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Liberal Education in the Broad Buddhist Tradition: Visions and
Seminal Texts1
Shih Yu “Franklyn” Wu
Dharma Realm Buddhist University
I joined Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) in Fall 2010 just as the university began
to undergo a transformation. Aiming to expand its reach beyond a small community of
monastic and lay students whom it had served since 1976, the leadership of DRBU and its
parent organization initiated a campaign to redesign the university from the ground up. As we
began the campaign, we found ourselves asking questions such as “What does a Buddhist
college look like?” “What does a liberal education in the Buddhist tradition mean, and what is
it for?”
After much collective critical reflection on these and other related questions, we worked to
capture the main thrusts of our discussions in a reformulated mission statement for the
university:
[DRBU] is a community dedicated to liberal education in the broad Buddhist
tradition—a tradition characterized by knowledge in the arts and sciences,
self–cultivation, and the pursuit of wisdom. Its pedagogical aim is thus twofold: to
convey knowledge and to activate an intrinsic wisdom possessed by all individuals.
Developing this inherent capacity requires an orientation toward learning that is
dialogical, interactive, probing, and deeply self–reflective. Such education makes one
free in the deepest sense and opens the opportunity to pursue the highest goals of
human existence.
This statement became the basis for all subsequent developments of DRBU. Today, DRBU
offers two liberal education program: one masterslevel and one bachelorlevel. These two
programs are based on an educational model similar to models used at a number of colleges
loosely, and perhaps imprecisely, categorized as “Great Books Colleges.” DRBU’s programs
have a sequentially built, allrequired curriculum consisting of a collection of seminal classical
texts from Europe, India, and China with a distinct emphasis on texts from the broad Buddhist
tradition. Both programs also include a series of translationoriented language tutorials in
Classical Chinese and Sanskrit, and in the BA program we have added mathematics, natural
science, and music tutorials.
At DRBU, we want our students to take on their own “pursuit of wisdom,” even if, when they
first start the journey, they might not be able to grasp or articulate what wisdom is and how to
pursue it. The two curricula are virtually free of conventional textbooks or secondary criticisms
and the discipline expertise that tends to come with those materials. Instead, our students’
1
A small section of this paper was adapted from the 20132014 DRBU Catalog, which I codrafted with
several other members of the DRBU faculty.
1
�reading lists consist of classical great works. To further encourage direct encounters with the
texts, we also conduct our classes in a seminar style where discussion about the materials at
hand is the main mode of instruction. To do this, we as professors eschew the role of
authoritative expert in the classroom and act more as advanced learners. This shift in role
away from a more conventional understanding of “college professor” also allows all of us an
opportunity to learn something new outside of our fields and eventually become capable of
leading classes across the curriculum.
DRBU further added an experiential component to the two programs that entails close reading
of primary sources done in conjunction with a “laboratory” experience consisting of different
contemplative exercises. This unique hermeneutical tool, where intellectual inquiry is informed
and enhanced by contemplative practice, allows students to gain a fuller appreciation of
classical texts as both philosophical treatises and dynamic methods of inquiry. This
component is currently being tested with readings of Buddhist texts, though we are exploring
the idea of adding this experiential components to other texts in our curriculum.
DRBU’s decision to adopt and adapt this educational model is a carefullyconsidered one that
took much research as well as individual and group deliberation. This choice is a tribute to the
foundation that St. John’s College has laid down and the quality of education it continues to
offer today to its student. Crucially, we found a high degree of compatibility between this
model and our vision of Buddhist liberal education. I want to use this opportunity to share
several examples of seminal texts that help to shape that vision.
Interestingly, I find myself starting this discussion at the endwith the penultimate chapter of
the Avatamsaka (or Flower Adornment) Sutra, perhaps the grandest of all Buddhist classics.
The Gandavyuha chapter is an epic that tells the tale of the youth Sudhana’s spiritual quest.
In this epic, Sudhana encounters the bodhisattva Manjushri and resolves to realize ultimate
awakening (bodhisattvas are beings who have awakened to the nature of things and also
assist others toward the same awakening). In the subsequent exchanges, Manjushri advices
Sudhana that drawing near wise and goodknowing friends or teachers on the spiritual path
serves as the beginning and the logical course toward perfect wisdom. These wise and
goodknowing friends or teachers are referred to with the Sanskrit word “kalyanamitra”. This
word is often translated as spiritual friend, noble friend, or goodknowingandwise friend.
Although it is frequently used to designate a wise teacher who is more advanced along the
path of learning (such as the Buddha), it has also been used to indicate wholesome and
beneficial friendships among peers.
Heeding the advice, Sudhana takes Manjushri as his first wise teacher and asks him a series
of questions related to how one can learn and perfect practices of a Bodhisattva: (again
Bodhisattvas are beings who are themselves awakened and are assisting others toward
awakening)
2
�How is a bodhisattva to study [cultivate, tend toward, maintain, purify, accomplish,
follow, recollect, expand] Bodhisattva practices?2
Without responding to Sudhana’s questions directly, Manjushri reiterates the importance of
drawing near wise teachers. He then helps Sudhana refine his questions, and sends him to
pose these questions to the next wise teacher. The same pattern is repeated fifty some odd
times on Sudhana’s journey: Sudhana poses the questions to a wise teacher or noble friend ,
he or she responds to Sudhana’s questions, those responses lead to further questions, and
the teacher or friend sends Sudhana to the next teacher or friend to pose the set of new or
refined questions. Toward the end of the epic, Sudhana experiences an awakening during his
encounter with the bodhisattva Maitreya. Maitreya informs Sudhana that his next kalyanamitra
will again be his first: Manjushri, with whom he started his journey. Instead of refining or
changing Sudhana’s questions like the previous teachers did, he suggests that Sudhana
returns to the initial questions he asked Manjushri during their first encounter. Maitreya also
promises that Sudhana’s journey will come to an end of sort and he will find out from
Manjushri who his ultimate kalyanamitra is.
Next, as Sudhana travels to meet Manjushri, Manjushri extends his hand over a vast distance
and rubs Sudhana’s head. Then without entertaining the questions Sudhana had during their
first encounter, Manjushri praises Sudhana for undertaking the journey, has a wordless
exchange with Sudhana, and disappears. Sudhana, now awakened, ends his journey where
he startedwith Manjushri, the symbol of great wisdom. The bodhisattva also hints to
Sudhana that ultimately, he is his own true kalyanamitra.
This epic highlights a key concept that underlies the founding vision of DRBU: that wisdom,
even in its highest form, is inherent in all individuals and that therefore the pursuit of wisdom
may ultimately be an internal one. Second, even though wisdom is inherent, it is latent in most
individuals, and activating and drawing out wisdom requires efforts, perseverance, and
guidance from wise teachers and noble friends. Third, Sudhana’s journey from teacher to
teacher is driven by his own resolve for awakening and questions about how he may get
there; as he learns something new, he adjusts his questions with guidance from his wise
teachers so he can inquire even more deeply. His journey therefore models a kind of learning
that begins with curiosity and is sustained by questions. These concepts lend support to an
educational vision that entrusts significant responsibility to the students for their own learning
and fosters a trusting, supportive community of learners. DRBU’s allrequired curriculum,
small cohort size, discussioncentered instruction, and the nonexpert role that professors
play are wellaligned to this educational vision.
The Gandavyuha epic points to the importance of wise teachers and noble friends in pursuit
of wisdom, which presents a challenge. Although the community of learners that DRBU
2
I like how Cleary phrases this set of questions in his translation (1178) and the set of verbs (study,
cultivate, tend toward, etc.) from the BTTS translation (209).
3
�faculty and students form may serve the functions of a peer kalyanamitra (or noble friends),
the notion of a wise spiritual teacher (or dare I say, a guru) is not appropriate in a modern
higher education context.
This leads us to the next Buddhist classics: the Mahaparinibbana Sutta. The text begins with
the Buddha informing his disciples that he will die shortly. In response to his disciples’
questions on who will succeed him as their next wise teacher, the Buddha instructed his
students to take as their next “teacher” not an individual, but “the teachings”: the philosophy
and practices leading to selfknowledge and a clear understanding of the nature of reality
(Walshe 270). This vast body of knowledge, initially passed along as an oral tradition,
gradually coalesced into a collection of works known as the Dharma and Vinaya—the
Buddhist classics.
The use of two terms, Dharma and Vinaya, rather than the single term philosophy, highlights
the central defining feature of these works: the dynamic fusion of theory and praxis. Because
the “study of” and “doing of” philosophy mutually respond, the Buddhist classics were not
intended merely as abstract doctrinal expositions of readymade knowledge. Rather, they
were meant to both inform and form, to explain and engage. Overall, they aim to stimulate an
internal dialogue that encompasses the intellect, imagination, sensibility, and will, a process
called “selfcultivation.” The experiential component previously described is our attempt to
implement this vision of “selfcultivation” in DRBU’s programs.
The Buddha once compared these teachings in selfcultivation to a vast ocean: “...just as
the ocean has a single taste—that of salt—in the same way, this Dhamma and
Vinaya has a single taste: that of [liberation].” (Thanissaro, “Uposatha Sutta”; sec. 6)
The text invites questions rather than dictate answers: How does each individual construct a
world of meaning, and how can that world be transformed and deepened into a site of
liberation? The freeing up and broadening of the human spirit to pursue such questions was
the original intent of the Buddhist classics and the continuing purpose for studying them now.
The Buddha’s final teaching is strongly suggestive of a curriculum consisting of classical
primary texts and an approach to reading that is both critical and respectful. At DRBU we find
the intent and purpose of freeing up and broadening the human spirit to be part and parcel of
great works from different classical traditions. In fact, extending DRBU’s curriculum to include
primary texts from China and India’s many textual traditions, as well as the classical legacy of
Europe, can be understood as a richer and more meaningful process of broadening and
liberating the human spirit.
Given the vastness of each of these classical traditions, selecting texts for the curricula of
DRBU’s 2year masters and 4year bachelor programs has been, and will continue to be the
subject of healthy and active debate among members of the DRBU faculty. Given that
DRBU’s mission statement identifies wisdom as a highlevel marker for DRBU’s vision of
4
�Buddhist liberal education, the topic of wisdom seems the most appropriate starting point for
discussion on criteria for selecting texts.
Wisdom is a word many Western scholars use to translate the Sanskrit word prajñā (Pali:
paññā), to distinguish it from knowledge and understanding that is limited to an object or a
subject. It can be rendered loosely as “the act of knowing or understanding.” Various classical
texts have analogized prajñā to a “bright light” (Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the
Buddha 519), a “sharp knife” (Thanissaro, “Nandakovada Sutta”), and a “perfectly reflecting
mirror” (Heng Sure and Verhoeven 74).
The perfect mirror analogy describes a refined state of wisdom where the mind reflects the
objects of its consciousness free from distortion and retains no trace of them after they pass.
The knife and the bright light analogies point to the aspect of wisdom as a tool or skill of
inquiry and learning. These two aspects of wisdom form a virtuous cycle: through cultivation,
wisdom grows in effectiveness as a tool on the path of learning and inquiry; the use of this
tool leads to further penetration into the nature of things and ultimately leads to a liberated
mind accompanied by “perfectmirror” wisdomthe ability to truly “see things as they really
are.”
Classical commentary on the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta labeled these two aspects of wisdom
“conceptual right view” and “experiential right view” (Bodhi, “In the Buddha’s Words” 303),
where right view is an alternate term for wisdom. Conceptual right view refers to an
intellectual command of the Buddha’s teaching or philosophy through deep questioning,
rigorous analysis, and precise and nuanced conceptual exercises. The capacity to
assiduously apply conceptual right views clears and sets the stage for direct, unmediated
insight, or experiential right view, to emerge from one’s own experience. In a classic
metaphor, the nature of things is like an object grasped or pointed to by the hand that is
conceptual right view, and experiential right view are the eyes that behold the object.
In the section on right view of the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta (Thanissaro, “Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta”), the
elder Shariputra points to several structures a person can use to observe and analyze her
experiences and make changes to her attitudes and actions. In traditional texts, these
structures and several others are referred to as “soil of wisdom,” and they are among the
most well known conceptual tools and the most elemental building blocks used for
constructing bigger, more complex edifices. The domains of the soil of wisdom include:
● The nature of human existence, consciousness, and the objective realm (the Four
Noble Truth, the twelve links of dependent origination, the five aggregates, and the
elements)
● The mechanisms of causality (the twelve links of origination)
● An individual’s interaction and interconnection with others and the world around her
(the six sense bases, the elements, the taints, and the nutriments).
5
�Thorough and careful studying of these structures has been a standard part of training for
generations of Buddhist learners, and a strong intellectual grasp and mastery of these
structures is often considered to be a precursor, if not a prerequisite, to their penetration by
experiential wisdom. The examination of soil of wisdom, which requires the application and
development of intellectual skills and capacities, is thus well suited for the arena of higher
education. Further, the different categories of the soil of wisdomthe nature of human
existence, mechanisms of causality, and the relationship between self and the worldare
recurring themes that can be found in many seminal and abiding works from different
traditions. This is a useful criterion for selecting texts for the DRBU programs, namely,
whether text provide important insights and stimulate significant questions or deep reflections
about one or more of these themes.
So what is Buddhist liberal education for? The DRBU mission statement gives strong clues for
answering this question, which is why I have use a big part of this paper discussing wisdom
and its pursuit. I will end with two paragraphs from our catalog that were written to provide an
overview of DRBU’s programs:
“The ultimate goal of such inquiry is to develop men and women who can stand on
their own. By directly wrestling with the texts and, by extension, their own thoughts,
feelings, and tendencies, they acquire a hardwon confidence and clarity that serves
as a foundation for engaging life to its fullest. Amid all the conflicting desires and
complex issues they will encounter, such individuals can undertake for themselves to
discern, decide, and act upon what is true to themselves and responsible to others.
In this way, the goal of a liberally educated person is exercised and exemplified in
vivo, all along and throughout their learning experience. We adhere to the dictum ‘as
you hope to arrive, so proceed.’ If the goal is responsible, thoughtful, and creative
citizens, then in their formative experience, students must learn how to take
responsibility for their own development at every turn. The Buddhist view of a liberated
and enlightened individual and the Western view of a liberally educated and
responsible person clearly align on this goal. In both views, the individual is radically
free and radically responsible.”
6
�Work Cited
Trans. Heng Sure and Martin Verhoeven. The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform
Sutra. 4th ed. Ukiah: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 2014. Print.
Trans. Buddhist Texts Translation Society. The Flower adornment Sutra: Chapter 39, Entering
the Dharma Realm, Part 1. Talmage: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 1980. Print
In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon. Ed. Bhikkhu
Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005. Print.
. The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Anguttarra Nikaya.
Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2012. Print.
The Flower Ornament Scripture. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston & London: Shambhala,
1993. Print
Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu. “Uposatha Sutta: Uposatha (UD 5.5).” Access to Insight
(Legacy Edition). 3 Sep. 2012. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
. “Nandakovada Sutta: Nandaka’s Exhortation (MN146).” Access to Insight (Legacy
Edition). 30 Nov. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
. “Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta: Right View (MN 9).” Access to Insight (Legacy Edition). 30 Nov.
2012. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya. 2nd ed. Trans.
Maurice Walshe. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995. Print.
7
�
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Liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition : visions and seminal texts
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Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
The Ethical Community and the Cultivation of Virtue in Kant’s Rational Religion
Insisting on the radical autonomy of human agency, Kant is often understood as
developing a form of morality intended to be universally applicable regardless of the prevailing
nomoi of any given socio-political order. Since the ground of morality lies in every man’s
capacity for spontaneous self-determination, one ought always and everywhere to be able to
determine one’s will in accordance with the moral law. Such an image of human morality seems
to insulate the individual from the influence—whether for good or ill—of his or her community,
and since only intentions (not outcomes) determine the goodness of a moral choice, it seems to
make morality an internal and private affair.
In Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, however, Kant explores the importance
of man’s communal life, especially his religious practice, for the cultivation of moral individuals.
Arguing that we are receptive to public representations of the good, the holy and the just, Kant
concludes that we are duty bound to be concerned with the community’s understanding of virtue
and how it represents this understanding to itself. To this end, Kant explores the role of the
church both as an empirical, historical reality and as a rational idea. By connecting the
individual’s pursuit of morality with that of his companions, the church—not simply as an
aggregate of individuals but as a collective whole of some sort—constitutes a distinct domain of
human activity. Understood in its rich complexity as the realm in which the ethical is made
manifest in imaginative story, customary practices and aesthetic representations, the church is the
medium in which an individual interacts in a distinctly moral way with his or her peers.
In particular, the church is the domain for the articulation and the realization of our
shared moral ideals. Accordingly, it is communal not only insofar as it is the locus of our moral
education in the present but also, and more importantly, in its being the vehicle of our future
1
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
aspirations. This two fold temporal orientation works in tandem with a twofold logical
orientation: the church is the medium in which one relates, on the one hand, to one’s concrete,
particular peers in the performance of moral duties and obligations to those around us—what we
might call moral neighborliness—and, on the other, to the species as a whole, through our hope
for the realization of the highest good—or, what Kant calls “the wish of all well-disposed human
beings, that the kingdom of God come, that his will be done on earth.”1
In the following, I want to show how Kant’s notion of an ideal church—what Kant calls
the “ethical-community”—constitutes a response to these two dimensions of human concern.
From the perspective of the developing individual, the church is the institution that most aids his
moral maturation; because we are not simply rational automatons, its principal role is pedagogic,
leading individuals from the inchoate and confused mess of conflicting moral beliefs and habits
to our natural fulfillment as rational moral agents. From a more global perspective, the church is
not only an organ of education—a mechanism for promoting the flourishing of discrete
individuals—it is the collective and shared project to which we all ought to be directed and in
which we find our deepest satisfaction. In short, it is the realm in which the summum bonum
returns to Kant’s socio-political thought.
The paper will have three sections. First, I will describe the peculiar anthropology Kant
offers in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, specifically how the notion of “radical
evil” and two related features of human practical reason substantially modify the standard or
“textbook” picture of Kant’s account of rational agency. Second, I will show why the ethicoreligious sphere is necessarily distinct from the juridico-political, and as such constitutes a
1
Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, The
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6:101. Citations will refer to the standard Prussian Academy
Edition of Kant’s collected works by giving volume and page number, except for references to the Critique of Pure
Reason, which cite page numbers from the first (A) and second (B) editions.
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�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
response to this insight into the human condition. Third, I will treat Kant’s account of how the
full and complete realization of man’s moral efforts would issue in a unique form of communion,
“the ethical community.” Finally, I will conclude with some suggestions as to why Kant thinks
such a communal end is the culmination of our activity as autonomous individuals.
I. Kant’s Religious Anthropology
Kant is often criticized for presenting a picture of human psychology that is either naïve
or perverse and a moral philosophy that is either excessively rigorous or fantastically idealistic.
Moreover, Kant’s picture of an independent, autonomous agent engaged in self-legislation,
continually observing the dictates of the universal moral law regardless of particular exigencies,
appears to exemplify those trends in modern philosophy that depict man as an atomistic being
endowed with a ratiocinative capacity but lacking any essential connection to those around him.
In light of such an image of the human, one might wonder why religion is necessary. What role
could a church play, if the human is a kind of self-sufficient, moral res cogitans?
However, in a few easily overlooked remarks in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, Kant reminds his reader that the description of moral agency from the a priori
perspective “needs anthropology for its application to human beings.”2 That is, since the
structural principles of morality are derived “from the universal concept of a rational being as
such,” understanding what is distinctively human requires an anthropology to connect the pure
principles of a priori moral reasoning, which “hold for every rational being,” with the embodied,
localized flesh-and-blood person.3 Such an anthropology would account for the peculiarities of
2
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, The Cambridge Edition of
the Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. and ed. Mary G. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
4:412.
3
Ibid., 4:412.
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�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
the human condition, distinguishing man’s rationality and will from their pure or angelic
counterpart. In particular it would account for both man’s fallibility and his perfectibility. In
other words, as should become clear in the following, this anthropology would explain why the
rational animal needs religious institutions.
In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant goes some way to offering such
an anthropology, describing three distinct but interconnected elements of the human constitution
that characterize our exercise of practical reason: (1) radical evil, (2) the need to posit ends, (3)
receptivity to conditions.
Kant argues that since all action is preceded by a determination of the will in accordance
with a maxim, any evil deed is the result of the willfull subordination of the claims of duty to the
claims of “self-love.” Consequently, “it must be possible to infer a priori from a number of
consciously evil actions, . . . an underlying evil maxim, and from this, the presence in the subject
of a common ground . . . of all particular morally evil maxims.”4 In the very essence “of a human
being,” therefore, there must lie a propensity to evil.5 That is, the source of evil cannot be man’s
sensual nature or his natural desire for happiness, there must be something in his will that
actively subordinates the dictates of the moral to such heteronomous ends. Thus, “the ground of
evil cannot lie in any object determining the power of choice through inclination, not in any
natural impulses, but only in a rule that the power of choice itself produces for the exercise of its
freedom.”6 Thus the ground of evil lies in man’s capacity to give himself rules, in his very
capacity for autonomous action.7 The will, therefore, is the locus for a war between two
4
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:20.
Ibid., 6:21.
6
Ibid., 6:21.
7
It is not mere sensual receptivity or the promptings of natural instinct that interfere with the adoption of genuine
moral principles. There must be, in addition, some active resistance on our part to the adoption of moral maxims.
“Genuine evil consists in our will not to resist the inclinations when they invite transgression” (Ibid., 6:58). Since,
the universal command of the moral law is always present to us, we must be actively turning away from it in all evil
5
4
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
countervailing propensities. The individual is “by nature” both good and evil because “he holds
within himself a first ground” for the adoption of good (lawful) or evil (unlawful) maxims, and
“he holds this ground qua human.”8
The realization or actualization of this propensity for evil depends on what Kant
identifies as one of “the inescapable limitations of human beings and of their practical faculty of
reason” namely that we are unable to determine our will independent of a specified end or goal.9
Kant states that, unlike angels, “in the absence of all reference to an end no determination of the
will can take place in human beings at all, since no such determination can occur without an
effect, and its representation.”10 For human beings self-determination is teleological. Our
awareness of the moral law may provide a “how,” but without a “whither” or wherefore we
cannot act.11 In “every action,” man seeks “something in it that might serve [him] as an end,”
which, though it comes “last in practice,” is “first in representation and intention.”12 For the
human, pure lawfulness—being motivated solely by the form of law is an ideal; man necessarily
asks himself: “What is then the result of this right conduct of ours?”13
But to have some motive force in the determination of our will, such ideas must be given
representational form, requiring “morally oriented reason [to] call (through the imagination)
sensibility into play,” thereby connecting man to locally available sensible material.14 This need
for representation is also described by Kant as an inexorable limitation of human reason, which
demands “for even the highest concepts and grounds of reason something that the senses can
deeds. Thus while man may have immediate access to something unconditioned in his awareness of the moral law,
he is nevertheless beset by a propensity toward evil, a perversion in the very capacity for self-determination that is
the ground of mankind’s freedom, moral action and dignity.
8
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:21.
9
Ibid., 6:7.
10
Ibid., 6:4.
11
Ibid., 6:4.
12
Ibid., 6:7.
13
Ibid., 6:5.
14
Ibid., 6:23n.
5
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
hold on to.”15 This need for a representation of an end to precede all our actions means that we
are receptive to the political, cultural and social circumstances within which we exercise our
freedom. Such receptivity makes political life possible, but it also means, whether for good or ill,
that we in fact exercise our freedom in response to the community’s representation of moral
ideas such as the holy, the just and the good and metaphysical ideas of God, freedom and
immortality. The domain in which such ideas shape our lives as moral beings is properly
understood as the ethico-religious sphere, which is the moral (as opposed to the legal) aspect of
our public, communal lives.
II. Politics versus Religion
Kant introduces the need for an ethico-religious sphere distinct from the political through
an account of how the three foregoing attributes of human practical reason are affected by our
social life. Appropriating Rousseau’s account of the baleful affects of amour-propre, Kant
argues that our social life is the source of many of our moral shortcomings, provoking “envy,
addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these.”16 Social life
promotes such corruption because it spurs the deleterious dimension of what Kant calls our
“predisposition to Humanity”. This “inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others” makes us
responsive to social opprobrium or approbation and so susceptible to moral education, but it also
can easily lead to the desire “to acquire superiority for oneself over others,” thus inclining us to
value ourselves comparatively or relatively rather than in relation to a rational universal
standard.17
15
Ibid., 6:109. Cf. Ibid., 6:65n; 6:80.
Ibid., 6:93.
17
Ibid., 6:27.
16
6
�Paul Wilford
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To counteract the morally adverse effects of social life requires comprehensive reform,
which is to be achieved through the formation of “a union which has for its end the prevention
of evil and the promotion of the good in the human being – an enduring and ever expanding
society, solely designed for the preservation of morality by counteracting evil with united
forces.”18 Kant describes such an "association … under the laws of virtue" as "ruled" by the idea
of promoting the good principle.19 In being commonly directed toward this end, the association
attains unity—the idea functioning as a principle of wholeness. In this regard, Kant’s description
of the ethical community recalls the classical political thesis that a polity attains unity by having
a common object of interest.20 Yet, and this is the decisive difference, this ethico–civil society is
entirely distinct from the juridico–civil society.21 So even though such an association may
emerge in a particular juridico–civil society and any given individual may belong to both
societies, it has “a special unifying principle of its own (virtue) and hence a form and
constitution essentially distinct from those of the other.”22
18
Ibid., 6:94.
Ibid., 6:94.
20
Cf. Augustine’s exemplary formulation of this principle: “Suppose that we were to define what it means to be a
people (populus) not in the usual way, but in a different fashion – such as the following: a people is a multitudinous
assemblage of rational beings united by concord regarding loved things held in common. Then, if we wished to
discern the character of any given people, we would have to investigate what it loves. And no matter what an entity
loves, if it is a multitudinous assemblage not of cattle but of rational creatures and if these are united by concord
regarding loved things held in common, then it is not absurd to call it a people; and, surely, it is a better or worse
people as it is united in loving things that are better or worse. By this definition, the Roman people is a people, and
its estate (res) is without doubt a commonwealth (res publica). What this people loved in earlier times and what it
loved in the ages that followed the practices by which it passed into bloody sedition and then into social and civil
wars, tearing apart and destroying that concord which is in a certain manner the health and welfare (salus) of a
people – to this history bears witness. . . . And what I have said concerning this peaceful and concerning its
Commonwealth, this also I should be understood to have said and thought concerning the Athenians, the rest of the
Greeks, . . . and the other nations as well” (Qtd. in Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern). Exploring the
possibility that Kant is giving a secularized version of Augustine’s account of two political communities would be
an especially fruitful avenue for illustrating: (1) although Kant’s juridico-political thought is, unlike the Ancients,
negatively determined in the tradition of Hobbes, the ethical community is determined by its telos, which (2) seems
to indicate the persistence of a quasi-theological aim in the communal project of the ethical community that is,
perhaps, also motivated by a similar erotic longing.
21
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:94.
22
Ibid., 6:95.
19
7
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
Thus, although there is “a certain analogy between the two, when considered in general
as two communities,” they must be understood as pertaining to different realms and achieving
their ends through different means. Three differences, in particular, are especially important: (1)
Even though both associations pertain to social relations, the ethico-civil community is
concerned with the formation of an internal disposition rather than the regulation of externally
directed actions. (2) Whereas a juridico-civil or political state is defined by the use of coercion to
enforce public laws, “an ethico-civil state is one in which individuals are united under laws
without being coerced, i.e. under laws of virtue alone.”23 For Kant, one cannot coerce virtue or
force people to be free. (3) Whereas political communities are always particular, parochial
groupings of individuals, “the concept of an ethical community always refers to the ideal of a
totality of human beings.”24
Nevertheless, there remains an important analogy between the two that helps to bring into
focus Kant’s understanding of the role of an ethical-community in the formation of autonomous
individuals. Just as a form of civil society is the political response to the juridical state of nature
or the lawless war of all against all, so too is the ethical community intended as a response to
what Kant calls an “ethical state of nature,” which like the juridical state of nature is one of
unremitting conflict, “in which the good principle, which resides in each human being, is
incessantly attacked by the evil which is found in him and in every other as well.”25 This is due
not only to the moral disposition of individuals but above all to the chaos of conflicting opinions
about virtue. That is, human beings “mutually corrupt one another’s moral predisposition and,
even with the good will of each individual, because of the lack of a principle which unites them,
they deviate through their dissensions from the common goal of goodness, as though they were
23
Ibid., 6:95.
Ibid., 6:96.
25
Ibid., 6:96-7.
24
8
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
instruments of evil, and expose one another to the danger of falling once again under [evil’s]
dominion.”26
The “ethical state of nature” does not consist in brutish violence like that of the lawless
political state of nature, where man reacts to natural impulses—especially, the desire for selfpreservation—but in a distinctly human form of discord, namely, "a public feuding between the
principles of virtue and the state of inner immorality which the natural human being ought to
endeavor to leave behind as soon as possible.”27 Our natural ethical state is not one of mere
lawlessness, but rather one of disagreement about what should govern our conduct, about what
laws ought to be followed, about the precise content of ethical ideas.28 This external contention is
then mirrored in our internal disposition; we reflect the confusion of conflicting moral ideals.
Disagreement over ethical ideas leads to a kind of disorder in the soul that impedes our moral
efforts. Just as, in the Preface to the first Critique, Kant warned of the deleterious and ultimately
nihilistic effects of theoretical disagreement about metaphysics, Kant here emphasizes the effects
of contentions debate over first principles on our ethico-religious lives.29
III. Ethical Community as Highest Good
The ethical-community is, therefore, an ideal of concord or agreement about the essential
principles of morality. Of course, mere concord or agreement is insufficient to correct the
insidious effects of amour-propre that characterize our sociality. To rectify the problems inherent
in our nature as gregarious animals—namely our tendency to judge our worth through
26
Ibid., 6:97.
Ibid., 6:97.
28
And, in so far as it is public, it requires man to have already left the juridical state of nature; there must be a public
sphere within which an individual can disagree with his or her peers.
29
See especially Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Avii-Axii, Bxxxiv-xxxv. Cf. discussion of the need to discipline
reason in Ibid., A751-52/B779-780.
27
9
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
comparison with others—requires the elevation of “true virtue” or autonomy. Only such a
universally applicable principle of morality, which is concerned with the internal disposition of
each individual’s will rather than external outcomes, can address our innate desire for distinction,
i.e., to be recognized as superior. In this regard the principle of autonomy is strikingly in accord
with aspects of Christian morality insofar as there is one standard common to all regardless of
natural differences, particular circumstances or historical accidents; it is universal and concerned
with intentions rather than outcomes, with purity of heart rather than excellence of judgment.
Yet, as we are necessarily teleological beings, the bare principle of autonomy in the
abstract is insufficient to determine our will. The content of the ethical teaching requires the
specification of projects. Accordingly the ethical-community is principally concerned with the
representation of two convergent ideals. On the individual, internal level, the ultimate end of
individual moral striving is a pure or holy will, i.e., a will determined solely by the dictates of the
moral law. On the corporate level, the formation of a perfectly just community, wherein merit
receives its due reward, i.e., where virtue and happiness are correlative. One of the great
achievements of Christianity, in Kant’s mind, is the representation of these two moral ideals in
the biblical presentation of Jesus as a moral exemplar and the idea of the kingdom of God as a
perfectly righteous community enjoying God’s beatitude.
Thus, the formation of the ethical community would not only serve to bring order to the
conflicting variety of moral opinions and resolve the tension between different moral
frameworks, reconstituting the moral landscape within which individuals reach maturity, it also
provides them two specific tasks: the perfection of the will and the perfection of the community.
These two projects seem oppositely directed—one inward, the other outward—and yet the two
projects converge, for the success of each is dependent on the other. True holiness is impossible
10
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
outside the truly moral world and the truly moral world requires all rational agents to be holy.
One is therefore not only concerned with one’s own purity, one’s own moral rectitude but that of
one’s neighbors as well. In the idea of the ethical community, interiority and intersubjectivity are
linked through the positive moral obligation to bring “the kingdom of ends” into being.30
Kant stresses that this obligation is a unique duty “of the human race toward itself.”31
Though unlike all other duties, this most comprehensive and global of moral injunctions is an
indispensible part of what Kant calls, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, “the true
vocation of reason,” namely to produce “a will that is good, not as a means to other purposes,
but good in itself.”32
For every species of rational beings is objectively - in the idea of reason - destined
to a common end, namely the promotion of the highest good as a good common to
all. But, since this highest moral good will not be brought about solely through the
striving of one individual person for his own moral perfection but requires rather
a union of such persons into a whole toward that very end, [i.e.] toward a system
of well-disposed human beings in which, and through the unity of which alone,
the highest moral good can come to pass.33
To grasp the full import of Kant’s claim it’s helpful to step back and recall the precise meaning
of the highest good. The idea of the highest good plays an essential role in Kant’s critical
philosophy. In the “Canon of Pure Reason” in Critique of Pure Reason, the highest good is
defined as the comprehensive convergence for all rational beings of the “worthiness to be happy”
and happiness.34 Here, the significance of the highest good for Kant’s attempt to elaborate a
systematic philosophy is made clear; for it is only through the idea of the highest good that we
30
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:433-437. Note Kant’s remark that “Teleology considers nature
as a kingdom of ends, morals considers a possible kingdom of ends as a kingdom of nature. In the former the
kingdom of ends is a theoretical idea for explaining what exists. In the latter, it is a practical idea for the sake of
bringing about, in conformity with this very idea, that which does not exist but which can become real by means of
our conduct” (4:437n.). Cf. Ibid., 4:462.
31
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:97.
32
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:396.
33
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:97-8.
34
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A813/B841; A804/B832-A805/B833.
11
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
can conceive of the convergence of the natural, phenomenal world, governed by strict apodictic
laws, and the noumenal realm of freedom, governed by the moral law, and thereby conceive of
the unity of reason’s activity. For this reason, Kant calls the ideal of the highest good “a
determining ground of the ultimate end of pure reason.” The very systematicity and coherence of
Kant’s philosophy, thus, depends on the teleology of the highest good.35
For Kant, the highest good is both an ethical-religious principle and a metaphysicalphilosophical principle; it orients our ethical and religious lives by providing a principle of unity
that reconciles the doubleness that characterizes our situation as rational but finite beings. The
project of realizing the highest good, whose religious form would be the establishment of an
ethical-community, is therefore not an ancillary, contingent addendum but an integral part of
Kant’s systematic philosophy. In other words, for Kant, to be rational requires striving for the
realization of the ethical community, for the perfectly rational and moral church.
However this effort to bring a moral whole or a fully rational world into being differs
from other moral injunctions, which—in accordance with the Kantian adage that ought implies
can—“concern what we know to reside within our power.”36 Working toward the ethicalcommunity is “the idea of working toward a whole of which we cannot know whether as a whole
it is also in our power: so the duty in question differs from all others in kind and in principle.”37
Such a duty, therefore, generates a “moral need” for another rational idea, “namely that of a
higher moral being through whose universal organization of forces of single individuals,
insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect.”38 It is in a sense a moment of
35
N.B. Kant’s description of philosophy in the ‘archetectonic of pure reason’ as “the science of the relation of all
cognition to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae). Ibid., A832/B860-A851/B879;
A839/B867. Cf. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:108-113.
36
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:98.
37
Ibid., 6:98.
38
Ibid., 6:98.
12
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
humility, of man’s awareness of his own insufficiency for fulfilling his highest purpose that is
the basis of his relation to the divine. Just as it is our epistemological limitations in the
speculative domain that “make room for faith,” it is the recognition of our limitations in the
moral realm that lies at the font of man’s religious convictions.39
Moreover, the ethical-community requires belief in God or a moral lawgiver since all its
laws “are exclusively designed to promote the morality of actions (which is something internal,
and hence cannot be subject to public human laws).”40 The interiority of the ethical requires a
transcendental lawgiver—someone, “with respect to whom all true duties, hence also the ethical,
must be represented as at the same time his commands; consequently, he must also be one who
knows the heart, in order to penetrate to the most intimate parts of the disposition of each and
every one,” and therefore be able to give “to each according to the worth of his actions.”41 Such a
legislator is, of course, nothing other than “the concept of God as a moral ruler of the world.”42
Conclusion:
To reiterate, there is a “moral need” for this higher moral being, for only such a being can
secure the end to which the ethical community is directed and can guarantee the ultimate
convergence of freedom and nature, morality and happiness. Only such a being can fully satisfy
the demands of morality and therewith reason’s need for coherence and systematicity. Hence,
this unique duty of the human species to itself, which is the religious manifestation of the idea of
the highest good, is coherent only if the species conceives of itself “as a people under divine
39
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. and ed.
Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1998), Bxxx.
40
Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:99.
41
Ibid., 6:99.
42
Ibid., 6:99.
13
�Paul Wilford
Dec. 15th 2014
commands, i.e., as a people of God.”43 Man becomes himself and fulfills his highest purpose
only through understanding himself in relation to something above and beyond himself.
The individual’s pursuit of virtue entails the postulation of moral ends, these ends form a
unity only in a species wide teleological project, and the project can only be reasonably pursued,
if we believe in a divine authority. The individual’s pursuit of his own autonomy, the perfection
of himself as a self-legislating being, or what we might think of as his pursuit of wholeness
requires promoting the wholeness of the entire species.
The individual’s good is intimately linked with the good of the species and the good of
the species cannot be thought or pursued without belief in the benevolence of a divine
providence that will ultimately reconcile the rift between freedom and nature at the heart of the
cosmos.
43
Ibid., 6:99.
14
�
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The ethical community and the cultivation of virtue in Kant's rational religion
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PHILOSOPHICAL TRAINING, DYNAMIC THOUGHT, AND
THE PLEASURES OF COGNITIVE POWER
I was a philosophy major. When I graduated, my parents
attended graduation and met one of my professors,
Donald Crosby, a Whitehead scholar (among other
things). My dad asked him: “we’re proud that Rex
graduated – but philosophy? What’s he going to do with
that?” Crosby responded gently: “Well, among other
things, he’ll be better off because he’s done philosophy.”
My dad was incredulous: “Better off? How? He can’t
make any money with a philosophy degree!” Crosby
replied: “Well, sir, that only shows that there’s a
distinction between being better off and making money.”
It’s a running joke that majoring in philosophy puts you
on the royal road to a career in bartending or cab driving.
Now, I happen to like and respect bartenders and
cabbies, and I’ve known a couple who’ve made a good
living. But it’s unlikely that they are alone responsible for
the surprisingly high mid-career earnings of philosophy
majors. In a recent survey, Philosophy ranked 15th out of
50 majors in average mid-career earnings, at $81,000 a
1
�year.1 True, students earning a Bachelor’s degree in
Philosophy rank below the usual suspects, such as
Engineering and Physics. But earnings fifteen years out
from a B.A. in philosophy are on par with Finance and
Information Management degrees and with International
Relations degrees, and they’re ahead of all other
business degrees, all nursing degrees, all natural science
degrees other than Physics, all social science degrees
other than Economics, all nursing and health science
degrees, all arts and humanities degrees, and all criminal
justice degrees.
It’s likely that part of the explanation of this surprising
fact is that the population of philosophy students is a
self-selecting set of unusually smart, somewhat
obsessive, and attractively quirky students whose
combination of intellectual skills and idiosyncrasies drives
them to philosophy and keeps them there long enough
to benefit from the discipline’s virtues. It’s likely too that
those same traits in turn lead philosophy majors forward
1
“Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary,” from: http://www.payscale.com/2008-best-colleges/degrees.asp;
“Salary Increase by Major,” Wall Street Journal; from http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/infoDegrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html
2
�to make career choices that turn out to be remunerative.
And, indeed, we know that philosophy majors are well
represented in law and medicine, which, historically at
least, are among the highest paying careers out there.
Yet, I for one find these lucrative career trajectories a
little unexpected. I’ve taught philosophy for twenty-two
years, and in our department we disproportionately
attract and keep students of four types more than all
others combined:
(1) the disillusioned trying to come to grips with a
loss of childhood faith;
(2) the super-brainiacs double or triple majoring in
philosophy and Physics or Math or Fine Art or
Computer Science for no better reason than doing so
is hard;
(3) the political and social radicals who find in
philosophy an intellectual heft to buttress their
activist commitments; and
(4) the unlost wanderers who are bored with other
majors, have no interest in conforming to anyone or
3
�anything, and who find in philosophy departments a
group of other similar misfits.
Of course, other kinds of philosophy students also exist,
sometimes depending on the department’s affiliation
with other campus programs. For example, in the last
few years our department has attracted a small number
of Psychology double majors because we host an
interdisciplinary Center on Cognitive Studies.
If you look at the list, you’ll notice that three of the four
types are demonstrably not career-minded, and that the
only one that is – the brainiac double major – is only
indirectly career-minded. Yet when these students are
fed into the crucible of philosophic training, something
remarkable emerges – graduates whose training is about
as far removed from job preparation as can be imagined
but which nevertheless provides them a readily
transferable skill set that makes them promotable in
whatever job they land in. That’s what I’d like to focus on
in this talk. What is it about a philosophy degree that
turns out to be so useful?
Obviously and first, philosophic training is in the great
problems of philosophy – truth, beauty, the categories of
4
�existence, knowledge, justice, the moral good, and logic.
Knowing how to think about these perennial issues helps
philosophers understand others and the world better
than most, for, among other things, we’re quick studies
at identifying others’ core beliefs and we know how
difficult knowledge acquisition really is, and we are, as a
consequence, circumspect where others tend to the
bombastic and overwrought. But I think this knowledge
supervenes on something much more important, and
that is the dual ability to read and think well.
The simple truth is that reading and thinking well are
uncommon, scarce commodities that are goods for
employers, and philosophy trains students how to
cultivate these skills. The importance of this training
simply cannot be overstated. Recently, I was in Los
Angeles on a panel with Stacey Snyder, the co-chief
executive officer of Dreamworks, and Monica Karo, the
chief executive officer of OMD, the world’s largest media
buyer and the agency behind Apple’s marketing
campaigns for the last fifteen years. Our topic was the
commodification of attention. During our panel, Ms.
Snyder and Ms. Karo both said that what they value
5
�more than anything else is a person who has an opinion
and can make judgments, who can produce a
dispassionate argument in support of their judgments,
and who can speak and write clearly and directly. I wish I
had a video of that episode, for their description is a
description of what philosophy professors value and
what we try to cultivate in all of our students.
I don’t doubt for a minute that other majors also train
students to have some of these abilities. But I’m
prepared to defend the claim that no other major does
this training as directly or as relentlessly as philosophy,
for we work professionally with logic, we are professional
critics of language, and we are trained to critically assess
evidence across every domain we encounter. Such
training is provided in most philosophy courses, but
especially in courses in logic, critical thinking, the
philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, and
philosophy of science. In addition, ethics courses provide
students training in thinking clearly and carefully about
some of the most difficult questions they will invariably
confront as they enter the professional world.
6
�The result of an education in logic, theory of knowledge,
and philosophy of science is a kind of cross-training for
the intellect, made up of careful reading, clear writing,
and rigorous, critical, thinking. When this intellectual
cross-training is conjoined with the judgment cultivated
by ethics courses and courses in the world’s religions, the
product is someone who is not only well-prepared to
step into a wide range of jobs, but someone who is also
well-prepared to know when it’s time to leave a job.
Because philosophy majors can both see the big picture
and understand the most precise details and because
they can question assumptions, analyze arguments, and
occupy and understand alternative perspectives without
getting lost, they tend to stand out. And because their
training is in how to think well both in and out of the box,
they are unusually nimble in dynamic environments in
which complex decisions have to be made. And because
they have been trained to think well and write clearly
about basic questions, philosophy majors are wellprepared for talking and working with other humanities
types, scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists,
7
�lawyers, marketers, journalists, physicians, policy makers,
indeed, anyone who has to think for a living.
Not surprisingly, businesses recognize the benefits that
philosophy majors bring to their enterprises. Articles
have appeared recently in Business Week, The Guardian,
The London Times, The Times Education Supplement, and
the New York Times extolling the benefits of being a
philosophy major for business. 2 What these articles
consistently note is that while businesses have more
than enough experts working hard on specific problems,
they also reliably need individuals who can “connect the
dots,” employees who can extract knowledge from a
specialist’s expert domain without getting trapped in the
expert’s silo. For that kind of undertaking, a philosophic
training is tailor-made.
But it’s not just business that benefits when philosophy
majors are hired. Graduate and professional programs
alike welcome philosophy majors because they know
that philosophy majors will perform well. One measure
of their readiness for graduate and professional school is
“Philosophy is Back in Business,” Business Week 1/12/2010; David Brendel, “How Philosophy Makes You a Better
Leader,” Harvard Business Review 9/19/2014; “In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life
Examined,” New York Times 4/6/2008; “I Think, Therefore, I Earn,” The Guardian 11/20/2007; “More Things in
Heaven and Earth, Horatio,” Times Higher Education Supplement 01/09/2009;
2
8
�their performance on entrance exams. If the following
isn’t already known to this audience, it should be:
philosophy majors consistently score highest of all
disciplines on both the Graduate Record Exam’s and the
LSAT’s verbal reasoning and analytical writing sections,
and highest of all non-engineering or natural science
disciplines on the quantitative reasoning sections as
well. 3
Perhaps I’ve now done more than what is required to
persuade you that the job prospects for philosophy
majors are surprisingly good. In the remainder of this
presentation, I’d like to comment on one way of
understanding what it means to “be philosophical” about
issues when those issues are not discussed professionally
by philosophers or taught in the classroom.
One of the virtues of philosophic training is that it
cultivates within us a type of cognitive pleasure enjoyed
when we read carefully and exercise our ability to think.
This cognitive pleasure is one of the many consequences
of a training that insists on self-disciplining the
3
Philosophy Majors and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide.pdf
9
�imagination, which, when left free to roam on its own,
inevitably falls down one rabbit hole after another, often
with disastrous consequences.
In his Aims of Education,4 Alfred North Whitehead puts
the fundamental point succinctly: “freedom and
discipline are the two essentials of education” (p.30), the
former because without it education reduces to tedious
indoctrination, the latter because with it the cognitive
power required for what he calls “the adventure of life
(Whitehead, p.98) is achieved. When we willingly (and
sometimes, it must be admitted, painfully) subject our
free-roaming imagination to the rigor and precision of
philosophy, then so long as that training has been welldesigned and is executed with care, the product is a
human mind that has “an intimate sense” for the power,
beauty, and structure of ideas (Whitehead, p.12). From
that cognitive dexterity emerges a unique cognitive
pleasure, a delight that we take in the ways ideas fit
together and fall apart, in the unexpected implications
that ideas sometimes have, and in the realization that
4
Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (NY: Free Press, 1967)
10
�our cognitive powers are actually greater than we might
ever have imagined.
Having achieved some level of cognitive competence, a
properly trained mind is progressively liberated from the
blinders others want us to wear and which we all too
often put on ourselves. For the curiosity and imagination
characteristic of the Aristotelian human being, having
been disciplined by philosophical training, are now free
to wander where directed. And she may be confident
that her habituated cognitive skillfulness will lead either
to a positive outcome or to an opportunity for further
reflection and deliberation. Even if the latter is
occasioned because something awful has happened, it is
for the well-trained mind not without consolation, for
the reflection and deliberation prompted by a bad
outcome is as much a cause for some, albeit different,
cognitive pleasures as those that would have been
occasioned by a good outcome.
I believe that it’s this kind of puzzling response that
marks people off as “being philosophical.” True, we
sometimes use the description to characterize people
who are fatalistic or, if that goes too far, are at least
11
�atypically restrained about misfortunes. But so long as
we fail to acknowledge that one so described by the
epithet might have reason not to be completely crushed
by hardship, we miss a part of what it is be philosophical,
namely, to have an unquenchable capacity to be
surprised and filled with wonder by the world and its
inhabitants, even when their antics cause distress.
I’ve called the cognitive power subserving this cultivated
cognitive pleasure a virtue. I think it is. Unfortunately, it
can also be a vice, as occurs for instance when it is
unleashed as a display on the unsuspecting. Moreover,
even where it remains a virtue, cognitive power and the
pleasure taken in it are often baffling to others who
know nothing of them. The philosophically-trained and
philosophically-minded person acknowledges both vice
and puzzlement, and tries to avoid the former while
explaining, where appropriate, the latter. Some of us
become professors and have the opportunity to
represent the type while providing elements of the
training required for reproducing it.
I suspect that the habituated disposition to dynamic and
measured judgment, judgment informed by multiple
12
�levels of analysis and different perspectives, is part of
what Crosby was after when he predicted that I would be
better off for having been a philosophy major. Suffice it
to say, it’s what I took from the training that he and
some of my other professors gave, and it’s a significant
part of what my philosophical colleagues and I try to
exemplify and impart. We frequently fail, as we must, but
the great works of philosophy continue to remind us of
what has been, and still can be, achieved.
Rex Welshon
13
�
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Liberty and Authority: Religious Dogma and Liberal Education in Tocqueville and Newman
Austin Walker, University of Chicago
While John Stuart Mill may characterize liberty and authority as antagonists at the beginning of
On Liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy brings Mill’s clear construction of opposites into
doubt. For Tocqueville, a democratic social state, above all others, presupposes a kind of intellectual and
religious authority if liberty is to be well-cultivated and well-used. American liberal education depends on
a prior religious education, and specifically, on a religious authority. Authority and liberty can be
antagonists, but for Tocqueville, in the best case, they can mutually reinforce one another.
A similar argument is undertaken by John Henry Newman in his Idea of a University. Newman’s
emphasis on the importance of theology sometimes baffles readers as to how he can claim to be teaching
a “liberal” education at all. 1 But, I will argue, Newman has a very subtle understanding of the interplay
between religious and democratic authority, an understanding that can be too easily obscured. Only
through analyzing Newman’s arguments in light of Tocqueville’s understanding of a democratic social
state can Newman be defended as no reactionary at all, but as a very astute observer of the manner in
which knowledge is gained in a democratic age, and the eternal and the particular are intertwined. Both
see in modernity the temptation to seek a single idea or single principle as a universal explanation of
human affairs. Newman’s education is elite while Tocqueville’s is popular, and Newman is concerned with
academic disciplines while Tocqueville with democratic individuals, but both advocate a liberal education
that liberates men from the tyranny of a single idea.
***
Tocqueville discovers in equality the promise of an ostensible freedom that tends towards a real,
if novel slavery. Democratic man, by his condition, is led towards a belief in his “own reason as the most
visible and nearest source of truth” (Democracy in America, Vol. 3, 700). Equality of conditions means
that “the man who inhabits democratic countries…sees near him only more or less similar beings” (731J.M. Roberts, “The Idea of a University Revisited,” Sara Castro-Klaren, “The Paradoxes of Self”; Frank Turner,
“Newman’s University and Ours”; even Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of a University: A Reexamination.
1
�732). Since these other men are not incontestably superior to him, he sees no reason not to trust his own
judgment over theirs. Equality encourages individual judgment if for no other reason than that it levels
what would have stood out as extraordinary, aristocratic persons who ought to have been believed.
At the same time, the promise of individual reason hardly ever results in profound and sensitive
discovery, and a desire to think for oneself most often terminates in a lazy adoption of “general ideas”. 2
Democratic men “have a great deal of curiosity and little leisure…little time remains for them to think.”
Therefore, they “love general ideas, because they exempt them from studying particular cases” (736).
The “ambition…to gain great success immediately [without] great effort,” finds a useful tool in general
ideas, which flatters democratic man into thinking he “portray[s] very vast matters at little cost” (736).
While the emancipation of individual reason initially promises great advances, it leads almost of necessity
to sloppy thinking.
The democratic passion for general ideas combines with the enthroning of individual reason in
order to propel democratic men towards a narrow understanding of the world. “All the truths that are
applicable to himself seem to him to apply equally or in the same way to each one of his fellow citizens.”
“Having contracted the habit of general ideas in the one area of his studies that concerns him most…he
transfers that habit to all the others.” Since men seem similar, it strikes his mind as plausible—or even
necessary—that they all be governed by the same force. Whatever branch of study is his specialty, he
attempts to universalize to explain the entire world. Thus the desire “to explain an ensemble of facts by
a sole cause becomes an ardent and often blind passion to the human mind” (732). Not only are men
drawn towards general explanations, they are also led to universalize their own experience or expertise
in order to create a governing general idea. Men are less at risk of universally becoming Marxist
materialists than lawyers are of assuming the law to be the only operative principle in the world (or
political economists with self-interest, to take only two examples).
In light of this danger, Tocqueville prescribes a single remedy, albeit a “painful but always
effective” (740) one. A practical struggle is the only cure for the lure of general ideas: “if there is a subject
concerning which a democracy is particularly liable to commit itself blindly and extravagantly to general
2
A working definition of a “general idea” is as follows: they “encompass a very great number of analogous objects
within the same form in order to think about them more comfortably” (727); they “do not attest to the strength of
human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency, for there are no beings exactly the same in nature: no identical
facts; no rules applicable indiscriminately and in the same way to several matters at once” (728); and they “are
admirable in that they allow the human mind to make rapid judgments about a great number of matters at the
same time; but, on the other hand, they never provide it with anything other than incomplete notions, and they
always make it lose in exactitude what it gains in breadth” (729).
�ideas, the best possible corrective is to make the citizens pay daily, practical attention to it. That will force
them to go into details, and details will show them the weak point in the theory” (739). He offers the
example of the Americans who, by taking “a practical part in government”, “moderate the excessive taste
for general political theories” (ibid). By experiencing the authority of practical examples which contradict
or limit the teachings of a general theory, the excessive tendency towards general ideas can be controlled.
Practical engagement in a particular science best prevents a tendency to over-generalize.
Nevertheless, at a certain point, even practical engagement exhausts itself and must take cover
in received opinions. Man cannot live without some “dogmatic beliefs” (712ff.) and Tocqueville asserts
the impossibility that any group 3 of men can reason out their own first principles. “The inflexible laws of
[man’s] existence compel him” (ibid.) to accept some degree of received opinion. If even philosophers
must take “a million things on the faith of others” (715), what hope is there for the average democratic
man of deducing first principles? The span of human life is too short for the task, and one who attempted
it would have an intelligence made “independent and weak at the same time” from the perpetual
agitation involved in trying to discover all fundamental principles. Man “must make a choice and adopt
many beliefs without discussing them, in order to go more deeply into a small number that he has reserved
to examine for himself” (715). The only question, for Tocqueville, is whether the received opinion allows
man to become free. “Somewhere and somehow authority is always bound to play a part in intellectual
and moral life…the independence of the individual may be greater or less but can never be unlimited”
(716-7).
The beliefs most advantageous to be received are those of religion. “When there is no authority
in religion or politics, men are soon frightened by the limitless independence…with everything on the
move in the realm of the mind, they want the material order at least to be firm and stable, and as they
cannot accept their ancient beliefs again, they hand themselves over to a master” (745). The danger to
the freedom of the mind is even greater than to political freedom. “When a people’s religion is destroyed,
doubt invades the highest faculties of the mind and half paralyzes the rest.” Each man’s mind is filled with
“confused and changing notions about matters of the greatest importance.” “Opinions are ill-defended or
abandoned,” with the result that democratic man “in despair of solving unaided the greatest problems of
human destiny” “ignobly give[s] up thinking about them” (ibid). If man is asked to construct the universe
himself, he will despair and withdraw. But still seeking order and stability of some sort, he will long for a
political order that is secure rather than free. Individual judgment in religious matters undermines a free
3
Tocqueville hedges his bets about whether rare individuals are capable of such achievements
�political order. Religious liberalism tends towards political despotism. On the other hand, the security of
religious opinion in no small part creates the conditions for political practical engagement. Liberty
depends on a higher, received authority.
***
The tendencies that Tocqueville identifies in the development of democratic individuals,
Newman’s university recognizes in the specific intellectual disciplines. On their own, the disciplines tend
to refer everything to themselves and universalize their particular conclusions. The remedy for this
overgeneralization is Tocqueville’s remedy: practical interaction among the disciplines, just as practical,
political interactions among democratic individuals curb the passion for general ideas. At the same time,
the disciplines can only be forced into this productive disagreement if, at a higher level, an un-argued for
authority is accepted: for Newman, theology plays the role of Tocqueville’s salutary religious beliefs. If
democratic men jettison authoritative religious opinion, they tend to isolate themselves; if the intellectual
disciplines exclude theology, they try to universalize their own conclusions. Newman’s university deals
with the education of an elite, whereas Tocqueville’s liberal education is widespread and popular:
nevertheless, both rely on the same principled interaction between authority and liberty.
Tocqueville’s popular education relies on two levels of authority: a higher one received and a
lower one democratically and practically created. Newman’s university recapitulates these two layers of
authority, even if some critics fail to see double. Much has been made of Newman’s invocation of an
“imperial intellect” which is “majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning” (The Idea
of a University, 138), and ostensibly depends on the authority of theology to properly order the university.
Secular scholars scoff at the notion that a “liberal education” would presuppose clerical supervision. But
in their focus on the role of theology as authority, 4 they fail to appreciate the degree to which Newman’s
university is not “majestically calm,” but in fact the scene of practical rivalry among the disciplines.
Theology and practical rivalry work together to create a “philosophical habit of mind” (51). At the same
In the critical essays included in the Yale edition of The Idea of a University, several of the contributors mistakenly
take Newman’s authoritative science to be theology (Turner, 259; Castro-Klaren, 319; Garland, 278-80). J.M.
Roberts, in “The Idea of a University Revisited,” makes the same mistake (206-207). As will be shown below,
Newman’s authoritative science is philosophy, not theology.
4
�time, theology’s specific role can best be seen after the extent of the practical rivalry among the disciplines
is made clear.
While named the Idea of a University, the animating idea of Newman’s discourses is more
precisely a liberal education. A liberal education consists in the acquisition of liberal knowledge, a process
Newman defines as “philosophy.” Newman’s particular definition of philosophy depends on his special
understanding of knowledge. “All knowledge” for Newman, “forms one whole,” that can only be
separated off “portion from portion…by a mental abstraction.” The individual “sciences are the results of
that mental abstraction.” All the sciences are “but aspects of things,” with the consequence that they “at
once need and subserve each other” (51). So, in theory, all sciences are complementary. But this
complementarity is only theoretical—or rather, ideal.
Though the sciences “need and subserve each other,” they do not themselves necessarily
recognize this need. Of their own, each science tends “to the exclusion of others…scorning all principles
and reported facts which do not belong to their own pursuit, and thinking to effect everything without
aid from any other quarter” (50). As examples, Newman raises the substitution of chemistry for medicine
or of “political economy, or intellectual enlightenment,” as a cure for “vice, malevolence, and misery,”
which are properly ethical concerns. Newman particularly notes the tendency of political economy to
claim for itself “an ethical quality, by extolling it[self] as the road to virtue and happiness” (89). Each
science, for Newman, perfects a particular branch of knowledge while at the same time being unable to
discern its own limits.
In order for a proper understanding of the whole to arise, Newman argues that it must happen
that “one [science] corrects another” (49), such that each science is kept in its own bounds “by the very
rivalry of other studies” (167). The recognition of these boundaries, and the proper integration of the
sciences into a whole, is Newman’s particular definition of philosophy:
the comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use of each to each, and
the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another,
this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from them all, and in some sense a science of
sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy, in the true sense of the
word, and of a philosophical habit of mind (51)
The cultivation of this kind of philosophy is effected by a liberal education (152, 167), so much so that the
terms philosophical education and liberal education end up being used synonymously by Newman.
�The universal or “broadening” features of Newman’s education have often been recognized. 5 Of
course, to emphasize breadth is to risk superficiality. How, exactly, can a university teach a student, in a
few years’ time, to see both the breadth of universal knowledge as well as the particular divisions between
each science? Newman himself clearly recognizes the necessity to specialize: students “cannot pursue
every subject which is open to them” and “in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the
multitude” (101). To try to learn everything is to make the mistake that “a smattering in a dozen branches
of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not” (142). A student must
specialize not only because of the limits of human life, but because the very process of specialization
teaches the necessary habits or disciplines of mind required by a liberal education. But then a liberal
education also presupposes a vast and encompassing view of the whole. How are these conflicting claims
reconciled?
For Newman, the seat of learning is as important as the character of liberal knowledge, and it is
the university itself that reconciles the apparently contradictory demands of universality and
specialization inherent in a liberal education. Broad understanding—that is, philosophy—comes not
through direct study, but through the process of living amongst the turmoil of the various branches of
knowledge. Students “will be gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole
circle (of knowledge). This I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning” (101). When
disciples of the various branches are brought together, they naturally “adjust…the claims and relations of
their respective subjects of investigation.” Thus the student “profits by an intellectual tradition, which is
independent of particular teachers…he apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on
which it rests.” By living among the branches of knowledge, “a habit of mind is formed” in the student.
Newman underscores this point later, when he contrasts various professors “in a university and
out of it.” Outside of a university, giving lectures on his own, “he is in danger of being absorbed and
narrowed by his pursuit” (166). But inside a university, “he is kept from extravagance by the very rivalry
of other studies” and he gains “a special illumination and largeness of mind” so that “he treats his own
5
Much has been said by various scholars about the character of Liberal Knowledge as Newman conceives it, and
much attention has rightly been paid to Newman’s opposition of Benthamite or utilitarian principles of knowledge
(Kelly, A Conservative at Heart?, 176-180). Ian Ker has highlighted Newman’s “fundamental requirement…[to] be
able to think clearly” in a manner that isn’t “narrowly specialized” (Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman,
33). G.H. Bantock has noticed the importance that a “tradition of (objective) value that will transcend the
individual and social purposes of man” (Bantock, Authority and Education, 130). Stephen Kelly has rightly seen
that since Newman conceives of a university as teaching universal knowledge, Newman’s liberal education
necessarily “incorporated both the liberal ‘philosophical’ and the professional ‘mechanical’ educational elements
of learning” (A Conservative at Heart?, 184).
�[subject] in consequence with a philosophy and a resource, which belongs not to the study itself, but to
his liberal education [emphasis mine]” (167). No scholar of Newman, to my knowledge, has recognized
the importance of this last sentence. Newman claims that the very fact of being in a university provides
a professor with a liberal education, and that this largeness of education is achieved not through
peaceable contemplation, but by means of “the very rivalry of other studies.” Theology is important for
Newman, no doubt. But theology is no imperial master within the university. Philosophy, not theology,
is the science that regulates all other studies, and it appears that philosophy is not, as it were, a discipline
that can be taught so much as a habit of inquiry that develops by being present within an active and
tumultuous university. In other words, no professor teaches philosophy so much as the university, by its
very activity, represents philosophy almost unconsciously. Newman may talk about the harmony of
universal knowledge, but that harmony is only apparent from God’s point of view. For man to achieve a
philosophical understanding requires an agonistic process: and this agonism is encouraged and regulated
by the university.
Once we understand the work that the sciences themselves are performing in Newman’s
university, we can finally be clear on the place of theology. J.M. Roberts, in his criticism of Newman’s
understanding of theology, displays the typical secular skepticism. Roberts is subjected to “an outbreak
of spontaneous hilarity” (Roberts, “The Idea of a University Revisited,” 207) by two of Newman’s
arguments. First, that the university should actively police a particular “unity of an intellectual system”
(206), wherein theology “arbitrate[s] uncertainties and…correct[s] divagation from right order” (207). And
second, when Newman describes the interaction between professors as “a picture of an imaginary
senate” (207). 6 Doesn’t Newman know, says Roberts, that the politics of the university are so intense
because the stakes are so low?
Roberts takes Newman to task for his argument that the theology department of a university
ought to enforce clear disciplinary boundaries when so much exciting research is happening “at the
borders” (Roberts, 209) of the sciences. As I have hoped to show from my argument above, Roberts
completely misunderstands Newman. Of course interesting work is going to happen on the fringes. That
is where the quasi-political debates about boundaries will take place and where political economists and
ethicists (and theologians) will be able to discover truly where they stand in relation to one another.
6
In Newman’s own words: “professors are like the ministers of various political powers…they represent their
respective sciences, and attend to the private interests of those sciences respectively; and, should dispute
arise…they are the persons to talk over and arrange it” (Idea, 369).
�Roberts misreads Newman because Roberts fails to see that it isn’t an imperial theology, but the sciences
themselves that will correct one another. Roberts, even though he quotes Newman on this very subject,
apparently believes that Newman believes that a university should have an all-powerful theology
department which disciplines each science authoritatively, preserving a kind of static order. Newman does
admit theology into his university as an important science, but he includes theology so that it will be able
to defend itself as a science by means of this same “rivalry.” Newman never argues that theology
sufficiently teaches the philosophical habit of mind characteristic of a liberal education. 7 The study of
theology does not and cannot—by itself—create or perfect liberal knowledge.
In discussing the role of theology, we have to be especially clear about the “non-religious” role
that theology plays. The development of liberal knowledge depends on the interaction of the sciences
with one another. The sciences, on their own, tend to isolate and universalize themselves. For Newman,
only theology is capable of forcing the sciences to engage in a way that limits their isolating and
universalizing tendencies.
Theology is at the center because Newman recognizes, like Tocqueville, that without certain
definite and authoritative assumptions, things fall apart. I am not arguing that Newman secretly believes
theology to be only an “authoritative opinion.” Newman devotes a full discourse to the argument that
theology is in fact a science (Idea, 19-42).
Nevertheless, Newman’s university depends on one
authoritative assumption: that all branches of knowledge are parts of a universal whole and can therefore
be reconciled with and be corrected by one another. 8 Theology supports this assumption through the
assertion of (or argument for) a created and knowable world. Without this keystone, Newman apparently
believes, the overwhelming tendency of the individual disciplines is to universalize themselves to the
exclusion of others. As we have seen above, this argument finds its companion in Tocqueville: if
authoritative opinion about first principles is jettisoned, man despairs of solving such questions by his
individual reason and isolates himself. Only by accepting authoritative opinion can productive political
interaction occur. And without this political or practical engagement, narrow views remain unchallenged
and are tempted into masquerading as general causes.
7
Newman himself is clear on the point that theology can just as easily degenerate into a merely “useful” study if it
is undertaken not for its own sake but for the purpose of pastoral or priestly care (Idea, 108-109).
8
Compare to Newman’s description of the representative of “the philosophy of an imperial intellect” who “has
one cardinal maxim in his philosophy…that truth cannot be contrary to truth; if he has a second, it is, that truth
often seems contrary to truth; and, if a third, it is the practical conclusion, that we must be patient with such
appearances, and not be hasty to pronounce them to be really of a more formidable character” (Idea, 461).
�Once a higher authority is made secure, experience and practice predominate in Newman’s liberal
education. Philosophy, or liberal education, only develops in a student through his being present in a
university in which the various disciplines—while assuming themselves to be part of a whole—check each
other by rivalry.
These disciplinary boundaries can never be static, so there can never be an
“authoritative” demarcation for the students to memorize. Discoveries in physics or biology challenge
and are challenged by political philosophy and literature. As a student watches the professors engaged
in a quasi-political debate, a kind of practical wisdom forms within the student, which can sense when a
claim to truth is reasonable and when it isn’t. For such an education, failures are almost as useful as
successes. The evolutionary biologist who claims that, say, there is a moral obligation to abort children
with Down Syndrome contributes as much to a liberal education as does the theologian who demurs to
established physical laws.
As with Newman, so with Tocqueville: a liberal education comes from the experience of liberty.
What Tocqueville says of statesmanship may also be true of a liberal education: “it is only in an
atmosphere of freedom that the qualities of mind indispensable to true statesmanship can mature and
fructify” (Ancien Regime, 144). But as Newman argues, the theologian and the biologist can only be forced
to talk to one another in a university where theology asserts the unity of the sciences. The “atmosphere
of freedom” in Newman’s university requires a theological unifying principle.
A university cannot exist without theology, but in its absence, various disciplines will attempt take
its place (181-182). The problem in this case is that an implicit theology will replace an explicit one. And
since the greatest achievement of Newman’s liberal university is a recognition of explicit boundaries of
knowledge, the most important questions (What belongs to this world? What doesn’t?) can never be
asked in a competent way. The careful obscuring of questions about principle is, in the opinion of both
Newman and Tocqueville, the great philosophical weakness of democratic liberalism as well as its great
practical support. If ideas are not practically challenged, they will expand past their proper boundaries.
Newman and Tocqueville both fear the prospect of men who, having given up thinking about general
ideas, are unconsciously governed by one or a few of them. Liberty from what might be called an
ideological tyranny is cultivated through practice, but this practice presupposes some dogmatic harmony.
Freedom from all dogmatism is not a human possibility, and it is through recognizing this that a limited
but real liberty can be cultivated. Tocqueville is concerned with democratic individuals, and Newman with
intellectual disciplines. Nevertheless, in their two objects they see a similar tendency towards an
overemphasis on general ideas, and a remedy in the cultivation of a practical and quasi-political debate.
�At this point we might be forgiven for asking what relevance this can possibly have: both
Tocqueville in politics and Newman in the development of ideas argue that freedom depends on
authoritative religious opinion. Practical interaction can do much to create authority, but at bottom
remains a dependence on a higher authority. We live in a world that has apparently jettisoned the desire
to search for or to accept (or even to reject) authoritative religious opinion. Is not Newman (and even
Tocqueville) made irrelevant by this circumstance? Perhaps we ought rather to wonder if our ostensible
progress beyond authoritative religious opinion isn’t really another means by which we disguise our
reliance on unexamined beliefs. Newman argues that no matter the circumstances, authoritative opinion
will inevitably re-emerge, the nature of the disciplines being what they are. The best that we might do is
attempt to discover what this opinion is, and to bring it to light. A new and implicit theology, in a sense,
will always be constructed on the incursions of political science and ethics and psychology into what was
once theology’s realm. 9 If this new theology proves inadequate or repulsive, we would at least be in the
position of recognizing the unattractiveness of a necessary opinion, and ascending from it. 10 Or, to use
an older analogy: we can never ascend from the cave if we never realize that we are inside of one.
See especially Idea of a University, Discourse 8, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religious Duty,” and Newman’s
discussion of the “Religion of Reason” (182-211).
10
Such would be Newman’s response to a critic, like Roberts, who says that this kind of “political” engagement
between departments and professors is impossible. Yes, Newman would say, it is impossible in your university,
because you lack the unifying belief in a knowable world and the ultimate harmony of the intellectual disciplines.
Such a belief can never be the product of argument or deduction, but must be secured beforehand, and religious
dogma is the only means thereof. This, at least, would be Newman’s response. It is left to the reader to decide its
adequacy.
9
�Bibliography:
Bantock, G.H. Freedom and Authority in Education. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1952.
Castro-Klaren, Sara. “The Paradox of Self in the Idea of a University,” The Idea of a University, 318-338.
Edited by Frank Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Garland, Martha McMackin. “Newman in His Own Day,” The Idea of a University, 265-281. Edited by
Frank Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Kelly, Stephen. A Conservative at Heart? The Political and Social Thought of John Henry Newman. Dublin:
Columbia Press, 2012.
Ker, Ian. The Achievement of John Henry Newman. South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1991.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2009.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Edited by Frank Turner. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Idea of the University: A Reexamination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Roberts, J.M. "The Idea of a University Revisited," Newman after a Hundred Years, 193-222. Edited by
Ian Ker and Alan Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition. Edited by Eduardo Nolla.
Translated by James T. Schleifer. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010.
Tocqueville, Alexis. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Garden City,
N.Y: Doubleday, 1955.
Turner, Frank. “Newman’s University and Ours,” The Idea of a University, 282-301. Edited by Frank
Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
�
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Liberty and authority : religious dogma and liberal education in Tocqueville and Newman
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Heideggerian perfectionism and the phenomenology of the pedagogical truth event
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Uniting Freedom and Lawfulness: Kant on the Power and Limits of Aesthetic Education
Samuel A. Stoner
“Each original author must be a poet.”
--Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
Immanuel Kant recognized the important role of education in human life, he took
the question of the nature and meaning of education very seriously, and he understood
education, in its highest form, as education for freedom. In this sense, Kant was a champion
of liberal education. Our guiding question in what follows will be the question of whether
and how Kant’s attempt to think through education as education for freedom can and
should inform our own understanding of liberal education, today. We shall approach this
question by examining Kant’s account of aesthetic education.
Kant is one of the first great modern philosophers to take the educational
significance of aesthetics seriously, and he founds a tradition of reflection on the moral,
cultural, and metaphysical significance of beauty and fine art that is carried forward by
Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, among many others—a
tradition that continues to shape our thinking, today. This essay explores Kant’s account of
aesthetic education, its power, and its limits. We shall see that, for Kant, aesthetic
education is especially concerned with the realization of freedom in and for human life. My
hope is that thinking through some of the questions that lie in the background of Kant’s
investigation of aesthetic education and Kant’s way of approaching these questions through
an analysis of aesthetic education will help us to further our own thinking about liberal
education and the status of beauty and the arts therein.
I.
Kant on the Problem(s) of Freedom
1
�To begin, it is important to recall that Kant self-consciously carries forward the
Enlightenment’s emphasis on the importance freedom. Indeed, Kant’s entire philosophical
project can be understood as an attempt to define and promote true human freedom. That
said, Kant recognizes that certain problems confront our attempts to realize freedom in the
world. Four such problems are especially relevant for Kant’s account of aesthetic
education. First, Kant’s critique of reason uncovers an important tension between nature
and freedom—“an incalculable gulf” between the causally-determined phenomenal world
on one hand and reason’s moral vocation, on the other. 1 However, reason qua moral
always already demands that this incalculable gulf be bridged for the sake reason’s own
moral projects. Thus, reason’s self-critique seems to undermine reason’s own-most
demands, thereby calling the possibility and meaning rational, philosophical inquiry into
question. The question of whether and how the tension between nature and freedom can
be resolved is of fundamental importance to Kant’s entire critical project and especially to
his analysis of beauty in the third Critique. Second, Kant notes an important difference
between external, political freedom and internal, moral and/or intellectual freedom. And,
though Kant claims that political freedom is possible even in a city of devils, he indicates
that the strong emphasis on the primacy of political freedom in the modern liberal state
tends to overshadow the more fundamental importance of moral and intellectual freedom.
Indeed, Kant ultimately concludes that moral and intellectual freedom are vital conditions
of a lasting, free, republican state. The question of how to synthesize internal and external
freedom constitutes the vital core of Kant’s political theory. Third, Kant recognizes a
tension between tradition and creative freedom. For, Kant sees that the great artworks of
the past tend to become models for imitation rather than examples of the power and
2
�possibilities of originality. The question of how it is possible to be influenced by tradition
without being enslaved by it occupies a central place in Kant’s analysis of genius. Finally,
Kant acknowledges an important tension between philosophical doctrine, which
determines thinking from without, and philosophical reflection, which embodies the
freedom to think for oneself about all philosophical doctrines. This tension emerges most
clearly in Kant’s distinction between historical cognition and rational cognition in the first
Critique, and motivates Kant’s famous claim that one can never learn philosophy but only
how to philosophize. 2 The question of how philosophers can promote philosophical
reflection is of crucial importance for Kant, both as a thinker in his own right and as an
author who writes for other thinkers. In what follows, I will attempt to draw out the ways
that aesthetic education, on Kant’s account, addresses each of these four tensions.
II.
Beauty and Moral Education
Any discussion of Kant’s account of aesthetic education must begin with his claim
that beauty is the symbol of the morally good. 3 Though Kant suggests a deep connection
between beauty and morality, he does not identify the beautiful with the good, as if the
contemplation of beautiful objects necessarily makes us better human beings. Instead,
Kant argues that beauty contributes to moral formation indirectly, by preparing those who
encounter beauty for moral judgment. More specifically, Kant highlights a formal similarity
between judgments of taste and moral judgments—both are disinterested. By habituating
us to disinterested judging, encounters with beauty prepare us to disregard our own
private interests for the sake of reason’s moral law. Indeed, Kant concludes that beauty’s
symbolization of morality points toward a sort of resolution to the tension between nature
and freedom—“taste,” Kant writes, “makes possible the transition from sensible charm
3
�to…habitual moral interest without too violent a leap.” 4 The question of the meaning of
Kant’s subtle acknowledgement that the transition between nature and freedom always
requires a more or less violent leap merits careful reflection. For our purposes, though, the
significant point is that Kant indicates that encounters with beauty indirectly contribute to
moral development and that an aesthetic education that exposes its students to beauty
contributes, if only indirectly, to humanity’s moral progress.
III.
Beauty and Social Unification
In addition to noting its indirect role in moral education, Kant highlights aesthetic
education’s social and political significance. For, strikingly, in the concluding paragraphs of
his analysis of aesthetic judgment, Kant suddenly turns his attention to the great difficulties
that confront the “task of uniting freedom” with law. 5 Despite humanity’s “vigorous drive
toward the lawful sociability,” Kant notes that laws are made and propagated by a small
subsection of society and will therefore seem alien and alienating to many of the people
they govern, like external authorities that work to determine thoughts and actions from
without. 6 As a result, most people will tend to follow laws out of fear, not because they
respect these laws and freely adopt them as their own. But, the free adherence to law by all
citizens is a necessary condition of a free, enduring, and morally good political society.
Thus, we must wonder: how is it possible to unite the few, who make up the legislative
class, with the many, who make up the bulk of society? How is it possible to bring forth a
unified society whose members do not simply bow to authoritative laws imposed from
without but rather freely adopt their society’s laws as their own?
Kant reasonably claims that such social unification depends on “the art of the
reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part [of society] with the
4
�cruder.” 7 But, how is such reciprocal communication possible? Kant highlights the
importance of discovering a shared “standard for taste,” i.e., a common stock of beautiful
images. For, taste is “a universal human sense”—a natural capacity, shared by all human
beings, that allows one to feel the pleasurable intellectual activity that grounds all aesthetic
experience. 8 And, because aesthetic pleasure justly claims to be “valid for mankind in
general,” the capacity of taste ultimately grounds the universal communicability of
aesthetic pleasure. 9 Accordingly, the cultivation of a common set of beautiful images opens
up the possibility of a mode of meaningful communication about these images that
transcends social differences. What is more, such communication about beauty lays the
ground for (1) a wide-spread recognition of the shared humanity of all members of society,
(2) a “universal feeling of sympathy” with and for other human beings, and ultimately (3)
the shared capacity to communicate intimately with others, regardless of their social class,
about more general ideas, questions, and problems. 10 Accordingly, Kant concludes that a
shared approach to beauty through a common stock of beautiful images forms a middle
ground between “higher culture and contented nature” that can mediate social, political,
and economic differences. 11 In this way, the aesthetic education of society can contribute
to the unification of society and lay the ground for a political culture in which the rule of
law is united with individual autonomy.
IV.
The Aesthetic Education of the Artist
Thus far, we have focused primarily on the more or less universal moral and
political significance of aesthetic education, and we have discovered two different ways
aesthetic education might cultivate freedom in and for humanity. At this point, however,
5
�we shall take up a more particular aspect of Kant’s exploration of aesthetic education—his
characterization of the aesthetic education of artists.
Kant argues that “beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius.” 12 Genius,
here, names “the inborn predisposition of mind…through which nature gives the rule to
art.” 13 More specifically, genius refers to the natural capacity that allows an artist to select
and express an “aesthetic idea”—i.e., a powerful image that provokes aesthetic pleasure in
those who encounter it. Thus, genius describes the special talent that allows an artist to
create beautiful art.
Unsurprisingly, genius’s beautiful art plays a vital role in the education of other
artists, and Kant indicates that it does so in two distinct ways. First, genius’s beautiful
artworks serve as models for imitation. Kant sees that genius’s beautiful art can and often
does make such a deep impression on its audience that it indelibly shapes and permanently
influences its audience’s approach to art. In Kant’s terms, genius’s beautiful artworks serve
others “as a standard or rule for judging.” 14 Importantly, though, judgment plays a vital
role in artistic production. Thus, genius’s art will inform the creative processes of the
artists it influences—if and when an artist encounters a powerful work of art, his
experience of this work shapes his notion of what a great artwork should be and guides his
attempts to create such beautiful artworks in the future. Accordingly, Kant concludes that
genius’s beautiful art often gives rise to (1) a form of imitation, in which an artist’s
productive activity is wholly determined by rules that are extracted from a genius’s
artwork(s) and ultimately to (2) ‘schools’ or traditions that provide “a methodical
instruction in accordance with rules” to their students in an attempt to carry forward the
legacy and distinctive style of their founder(s). 15
6
�All that said, imitation is foreign to genius. Genius, on Kant’s account, is
characterized precisely by its originality—its creation in accordance with rules that
originate in its own nature. By inspiring methodical imitation, then, genius’s art seems to
foreclose the possibility of future geniuses. We are led to wonder: Can genius contribute to
the aesthetic education of other geniuses? How can new geniuses ever arise out of an old
tradition? How is the aesthetic education of genius possible?
Kant argues that, in special cases, genius can provoke artists to abandon their desire
to imitate great artworks in order to attend to their own natural capacity for selecting and
expressing aesthetic ideas, independently of external influence. Kant names this distinctive
mode of imitation succession (Nachfolge). Succession is an especially important mode of
influence, for Kant, because it allows genius’s art to inform a student without undermining
the student’s originality and, therefore, the student’s ability to prove his own genius. Of
course, succession is difficult to achieve, and genius is an extremely rare talent. But, unlike
scholastic, methodical imitation, succession holds out the possibility that genius can
contribute to the aesthetic education of future geniuses by (1) freeing the potential genius
from the constraint of tradition, (2) freeing him for original artistic production, and thereby
(3) freeing him to participate in the tradition as a new link the great chain of genius.
All that said, it would be a mistake to conclude that genius is defined wholly by its
originality or that it wholly transcends scholastic instruction. Indeed, Kant is highly critical
of the unreflective and unrestrained pursuit of originality. He recognizes the possibility of
“original nonsense” that cannot, as such, be beautiful, and he demands that genius cultivate
a form of “discipline” that allows its products to remain purposive (i.e., beautiful) for their
7
�audience so that these products can enjoy “a posterity among others…in an ever
progressing culture.” 16 Thus, Kant claims that “there is no beautiful art in which something
mechanical, which can be grasped and followed according to rules, and thus something
academically correct, does not constitute the essential condition of the art,” and that
“genius can only provide rich material for products of art; its elaboration and form require
a talent that has been academically trained, in order to make a use of it that can stand up to
the power of judgment.” 17 Though they cannot themselves produce genius, then, the
schools are breeding grounds for genius, providing potential geniuses with the skills and
discipline necessary for the production of beautiful art. To realize their vocation, however,
potential geniuses must benefit from academic training without succumbing to the
scholastic tendency toward methodical imitation. The aesthetic education of genius
simultaneously cultivates a regard for tradition’s power and an independence from
tradition’s authority. Genius’s art inherits a tradition, while at the same time transcending
this tradition. Genius, in other words, embodies a freedom from tradition that nevertheless
harmonizes with tradition’s lawful character. Genius participates in tradition by
transforming tradition. Genius, for Kant, is the soul of living tradition.
V.
Beauty’s Philosophical Significance
Having discussed aesthetic education’s significance for morality, politics, and art, we
are now in a position to begin our approach to a fourth very important but oft overlooked
form of aesthetic education in Kant, namely, the aesthetic education of the philosopher. In
what follows, I will suggest that the philosopher’s aesthetic education is two-fold.
First, Kant’s fundamental analysis of beauty unearths an important metaphysical
insight; for, it ultimately allows him to reflect on the possibility of a “supersensible
8
�substratum of humanity,” in and through which nature and freedom are unified. 18 This
reflection attains its full clarity and depth in Kant’s resolution to the antinomy of taste.
Here, Kant argues that judgments of taste depend on an “indeterminate and also
indeterminable” concept of “the supersensible substratum of all our faculties” because the
existence of such a substratum is the necessary condition of the purposive but free accord
of the imagination’s spontaneous activity with the understanding’s lawfulness, which
accord grounds aesthetic pleasure and, thereby, the experience of beauty. 19 Though Kant’s
critical restriction of knowledge to the realm of possible experience necessarily implies a
unbridgeable gulf between nature and freedom and, by implication, the impossibility of
knowledge of the ground of the unity of nature and freedom in the subject, Kant maintains
that a thoroughgoing investigation of the meaning of beauty provides insight into the
possibility of this unity and even an awareness of its actuality. Thus, Kant’s investigation of
beauty teaches him about the possibility of the self-consistency of reason and, by
implication, the possibility of the meaningfulness of philosophical inquiry in general. It is
for this reason that CPJ is not only the conclusion but also the culmination of Kant’s critical
philosophy.
Second, in addition to providing metaphysical insight, Kant’s aesthetics also sheds
light on the nature and meaning of philosophical activity, as such. More specifically, Kant’s
account of the aesthetic education of genius and the process of genial succession elucidates
the structure of the problem of philosophical influence and begins to point the way toward
this problem’s solution. The problem of philosophical influence concerns philosophical
communication and emerges clearly in the first Critique’s distinction between historical
cognition, as a passive way of knowing involving memorization, and rational cognition, as
9
�an active way of knowing in which one thinks for oneself. 20 Historical cognition, according
to Kant, is a form of methodical imitation (Nachahmung) and it ultimately transforms one
into “a plaster cast of a living human being” formed “according to an alien reason.” 21
Rational cognition, on the other hand, is always drawn from “the universal spring of
reason” and embodies philosophical reflection qua the dynamic process of thinking
through a question or a problem for oneself, independently of all external authorities. With
this distinction in mind, Kant notes that systematically argued and powerfully expressed
philosophical doctrines tend to promote merely historical cognition rather than
philosophical reflection. But, Kant emphasizes the great importance of free, philosophical
reflection. Thus, the question arises: how is it possible to inherit and learn from a
philosophical tradition without being determined by this tradition. How is philosophical
education possible?
At this point, I hope that the formal parallel between the problem confronting
philosophical education on the one hand, and the problem that seemed to confront the
aesthetic education of genius, on the other, is beginning to emerge—both are grounded in
the question of how it is possible for a teacher to influence his pupil without simply
indoctrinating this pupil and thereby undermining the pupil’s freedom to think or create
for himself. We have already seen that Kant accounts for the aesthetic education of genius
by appealing to succession (Nachfolge), the unique mode of influence whereby a genius
inspires a potential genius to imitate his original way of producing beautiful artworks
rather than the beautiful artworks he produces. Now, it is crucial to note that Kant does
not limit the notion of succession to the sphere of genial influence. In fact, Kant argues that
succession answers to the more general question of how the great books—“classical”
10
�works, as he calls them—ought to contribute to human thinking. 22 Kant argues that the
great authors of the past must not “make their successors (Nachfolgenden) into mere
imitators (Nachahmern),” but rather “by means of their way-of-proceeding
(Verfahren)…put others on the right path for seeking out…principles in themselves and
thus for following their own, often better, course.” 23 Kant explicitly identifies this mode of
influence as a form succession (Nachfolge), which he now describes, in general terms, as
“any influence that the products of an exemplary author”—and here, he means any
exemplary author—have on their readers that allow these readers “to create from the same
sources from which the [exemplary author] created,” and to learn from their predecessors
“only the manner of conducting oneself in doing so.” 24 Succession in other words is the
essence of a liberal, philosophical education that teaches its students to think for
themselves in and through the careful study of the great works of the past.
All that said, the crucial question remains open: How is succession possible? Or,
how is philosophical education possible? Or again, how is liberal education possible? My
own thought is that Kant looks to and learns from the example of genius and especially the
example of poetry in his attempt to answer these questions. For, the example of great
poetry reveals that poets achieve succession in and through the provocative images
(aesthetic ideas) they produce. I would argue that Kant learns from the poets that
philosophers must supplement their powerful logical arguments, which naturally strive to
determine their audience’s thinking, with poetic images in order to provoke their readers
to think for themselves about these arguments rather than simply accepting them as
authoritative doctrines. Unfortunately, I cannot defend this claim here, but I will
11
�nevertheless suggest that the less on Kant learns from the poets is the vital core of Kant’s
own aesthetic education in the third Critique.
VI.
Conclusion
Kant interpretation aside, though, the question of the possibility of the mode of
influence Kant calls succession—a mode of influence that allows one to learn from a
tradition while maintaining sufficient freedom to think for oneself about this tradition, its
meaning, and its future—seems to me to lie very close to the heart of the question of
whether and why liberal education is still important to, possible in, and necessary for
today’s world. It should be a very serious question for those of us who love and study the
Great Books and especially for those of us who attempt to teach students through these
books. This question should challenge us, and I believe its answer is less obvious than we
often suspect. And if Kant cannot provide us with a final answer, he can help us to
formulate the question and think through its significance. We carry forward the spirit, if
not the letter, of Kant’s thought by working to answer this question for ourselves: How can
we achieve succession in our own thinking and teaching?
5.175.
A835/B863 ff.
3 5.351 ff.
4 5.354.
5 5.355.
6 5.355.
7 5.356.
8 5.356.
9 5.356.
10 5.355.
11 5.356.
12 5.307.
13 5.307.
14 5.308.
15 5.318.
1
2
12
�5.308, 5.319.
5.310.
18 5:340.
19 5.339, 5.344.
20 A835/B863 ff.
21 A836/B864.
22 5.282.
23 5.283.
24 5.283.
16
17
13
�
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"What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers
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St. John's College
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St. John's College Meem Library
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13 pages
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Uniting freedom and lawfulness : Kant on the power and limits of aesthetic education
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Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Samuel Stoner at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus.
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Stoner, Samuel A.
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Santa Fe, NM
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Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804.
Education, Humanistic
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Having the Capacity for Theoretical Reason
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics examines what human virtue (arête, excellence) is,
how one becomes virtuous, and how being-in-activity virtuously is related to achieving the
good that can be realized in action (1096b33), “that for the sake of which everything else is
done” (1097a18-19). 1 Aristotle chooses to ground his approach to this question in the
“function” (ergon) of human being, which is the kind of work that is distinctive of the human
being (I.7, 1097b23 ff.). He identifies three kinds of activities (energeiai) of which human beings
are capable, which he then associates with three parts of soul: nutrition and growth (threptike
… kai auxetike), perception/sensation (aesthesis), and what he calls “rational action” or the
“being-in-action of the part that has reason” (“praktike tis tou logon echontos”) (1098a1-4). His
thought seems to be: human being has a certain constitution or structure, as do all beings; if
one wishes to know what is the best work or activity human being can achieve, one should start
by understanding what work or activity is distinctive of the human being, and then proceed to
discover what the greatest excellence or perfection of that might be. Stipulating that putting a
capacity into activity (energeia) is better than merely possessing it (1098a6), and assuming that,
since only human beings, among natural beings have reason, Aristotle concludes, “Thus the
proper work [ergon] of a human being must be the being-at-work [energeia] of soul in
accordance with reason [kata logon], or at least not without reason” (1098a7-8).
Since Aristotle grounds his exploration and account of virtue in the functional structure
of the human soul, the Nicomachean Ethics, as it explores what virtue is and how human beings
may attain it, offers a compelling account of the capacities the human being has to be-at-work
and to be-in-activity. For today, the particular question I wish to explore is what Aristotle
means by the phrase “with reason” (kata logon), in particular with regard to his discussion and
account of ethical virtue (ethike), and what his investigation of ethical virtue tells us about the
capacities of human being to achieve the good.
In chapter 13 of Book I, preparatory to launching his investigation of virtue, Aristotle
redraws his outline of the soul. He replaces “perception” with “desire” (epithumetikon kai
11
Most passages from Aristotle’s text follow Martin Ostwald, Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (Prentice Hall, 1962).
When I borrow from other translations, I will note that. Occasionally, I will amend Ostwald’s translation, striving
for a more literal rendition.
1
�holos orektikon) (1102a32 ff.; 1102b30), because perception per se does not move us to act,
whereas desire does (see VI.2, 1139a19). He also characterizes both the nutritive part and the
newly recast desiring part as irrational (1102a28). The third part remains, for the moment,
simply rational. He then drops the nutritive part, as it plays no role in action.
Aristotle explains why he characterizes desire as irrational (alogon), saying that the
desiring part “fights against and resists the guidance of reason” (1102b17), and it “opposes and
reacts against reason” (1102b24). Yet he also says of the desiring part that it “participates
[metechei] in reason somewhat [pos]” (1102b30-31) because it is capable of “complying with
reason and accepting its leadership” (1102b32), and it can “listen to reason as [a child] would to
a father” (1103a3). He then turns to explore how the desiring part of the soul—which he will
identify with our disposition or character (hexis)—can become or be made excellent.
Someone who has an excellent character or disposition desires what is truly good.
Human beings are born with the capacity (dunamis) for this excellence, but the capacity has to
be developed. It is developed, claims Aristotle at the beginning of Book II, by the person
engaging in habitually doing good actions for, he says, “ethical virtue (ethike) develops out of
habit (ethos)” (1103a17). This means that we become just (i.e., come to have a just character, a
disposition that desires what is just) by habitually—repeatedly and consistently—doing just
actions, and self-controlled by habitually practicing self-control. “For from similar energeiai
come-to-be [similar] dispositions (hexeis)” (1103b21-22). At this point, Aristotle is emphasizing
the irrational, or, perhaps better stated, the childlike nature of desire. Character is molded or
trained, not intellectually taught, and this seems in keeping with his saying earlier that desire
has the capacity to listen to and follow reason as a child listens to a parent. 2 In light of this, it
seems perfectly fitting for Aristotle to say that the goal in ethical training and education is “not
in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good” (1103b28).
If indeed habituation is what shapes our character, that suggests that we are products
of our upbringing, shaped and molded by our parents and our teachers from a very early age—
before we are able to think for ourselves. By the time we come to be thinking beings, our
characters will have been largely determined. It also implies that a good upbringing is key:
2
One is reminded here of Socrates’ education of the guardians in the city in speech in the Republic (esp. Book III).
2
�commands to do good actions, consistently and repeatedly offered, supplemented with either
reward or punishment, will shape our character into something good (see 1106b10-12). What
remains then to do is to acquire experience and understanding of the world in order to be able
to exercise or express our good character by doing truly good actions. To be sure, Aristotle
later in Book II raises several questions about whether habituation is sufficient to makes us be
truly virtuous persons and agents, wondering “if they perform just actions and exercise selfcontrol, [must they not already be] just and self-controlled” (II.4, 1105a18-20). And yet, almost
immediately he appears to dismiss the difficulty saying that, “without performing [just and selfcontrolled acts], nobody could even be on the way to becoming good” (1105b10-12).
Given that desire is for some end, and the shape of our desires constitutes our
character, our character is what determines the ends toward which we direct our choices and
our actions. For action begins with some target—a desired or wished-for end. If we have a
good character, our desired target will be good, for virtue “makes us aim at the right target”
(VI.12, 1144a8).
The way Aristotle has been developing his account, it presents us with a grave difficulty,
which he leads up to by first discussing whether human beings are voluntary or involuntary
agents, or, in other words, are we justly held responsible for our choices and our actions. What
Aristotle wants to claim is that we are, indeed, voluntary agents, in virtually all circumstances.
Considering the commonly offered extenuating excuses of force and ignorance, Aristotle
concludes that only in the most extreme case—where the agent contributes nothing—may one
say one was forced and acted involuntarily (III.1, 1110b15-17). With regard to ignorance,
Aristotle allows that we may be ignorant of certain particulars, but we are never excusably
ignorant of the universal, which is, presumably, the good (1110b30-1111a1). That seems to
mean that we are responsible for knowing that we should be aiming for the good and—at least
on some general level—we are responsible for knowing what that good is. Applying his
recurring example of medicine and health, this is analogous to saying that, though not everyone
is a doctor, and therefore not everyone has the science or knowledge of medicine and its
mastery of particulars, nevertheless everyone should know that the aim of the doctor is health
(the good), and one should also know, at least in a general way, what health is.
3
�The difficulty, which seems to stem directly from Aristotle’s claim that ethical virtue, and
therefore good character, comes to be by habituation, is that that appears to make us mere
products of our upbringing rather than responsible, self-ruling or independent, agents.
Aristotle highlights this difficulty when he says,
But someone might say that all human beings pursue what appears good to them [tou
phainomenou agathou], but they are not in control of [ou kurioi] how things appear; depending
on the kind of person each man is, that is how the good appears to him [hopoios poth’ ekastos
esti, toiouto kai to telos phainetai auto] (III.5, 1114a31-1114b1).
If, as the objection suggests, we are merely products of our nature and our upbringing, with no
control over how the good appears to us, then it cannot be the case that we are truly voluntary
agents. For since the end guides and thereby to a great extent determines the means, we
should be pitied and pardoned for our choices and our acts, but not held responsible, or
blamed or punished (see III.1, 1111a1-2; cf. 1110a17-18). On the other hand, if Aristotle is
correct in his claim that we truly have the capacity, and therefore the responsibility, most
particularly to know what we are doing and to know that it is good (1110b30-1111a1), then it
seems that something more than habituation—even if it is good habituation and good
upbringing (see 1105b10-12)—is needed in order for us truly to achieve ethical virtue and to
become truly good. 3 In short, the question the objector raises is whether or not, and to what
extent and how, human beings truly do have the capacity to alter or overcome either their
upbringing or their nature, such that they may justly be held responsible for knowing the good.
For Aristotle to uphold his argument and defend it against the objector, he must show that how
3
In a lot of contemporary debates, the discussion is presented as an opposition between nature and nurture.
Aristotle is presenting something quite different. Whether our dispositions are molded by nurture or
(pre)determined by nature, both possibilities would seem to align with the “opponent” Aristotle is citing. For,
while he focuses largely on habituation and training, he also acknowledges in a few passages that different
individuals have different innate dispositions or characteristics, and that these may cause them to approach and to
see the world differently. For example, some by nature seem to be more timid, whereas others seem to be more
daring; some perhaps might be more angry whereas others might be more pacific. (See, for example, Aristotle’s
discussion about how the mean appears differently to different people, II.7, 1107b27-1108a1; 1108a32-35;
1108b4-6.) In the end, both those who have been habituated and those who are predisposed are determined in
their view of the end, and it is this that Aristotle wishes to challenge and, ultimately, reject.
4
�the end appears to an individual depends (to some extent at least), and is within the control of,
the individual himself. And though he does say in Book III that we must be [held] responsible
because we are in some way [pos] co-causes [sunaitioi] of our disposition or character
(1114b22-23), he does not explain there how this is so. That task he appears to leave to Book
VI.
Aristotle begins Book VI stating that he has completed his discussion of the ethical
virtues and that it is now time to discuss the other virtues, by which he means the virtues of the
thinking or rational part of the soul (dianoia; peri tou logou echontos ) (1138b35-1139a3;
1139a5). The reader is inclined to think at this point that Aristotle has completed his discussion
of virtuous character (hexis) and is now turning to examine the intellectual virtue (dianoetike)
that he had mentioned at the beginning of Book II (II.1, 1103a14), in keeping with the apparent
sharp divide he had drawn earlier between the desiring part of the soul and the rational part,
and the distinct functions and corresponding virtues of each. What Aristotle actually does,
however, is rather different. While he does indeed examine the rational part of the human soul
(the part having reason: to logon echon), he claims from the beginning that the choice
necessary for truly virtuous action requires that the desire be correct (orexin orthen) and the
reasoning true (logon alethe) 1139a25), that “what reason affirms, desire must pursue” 4 (“ta
auta ton men [i.e., logos] phanai, ten de [i.e., orexis] diokein,” 1139a25-26), and that “the good
state for the [part] that thinks and acts is for truth to be in agreement [homologos echousa]
with correct appetite” (1139a29-31). And, when he arrives at the end of Book VI, Aristotle
announces: “We must consider virtue yet one more time (palin)” (1144b1). He then proceeds
to distinguish between what he calls “natural virtue [phusike arête]” and “virtue in the strict
sense [kuria arête].” 5 Natural virtue, Aristotle says, is in us since our birth, manifest in us since
childhood (1144b4-5, 8). 6 And yet, he says, “we seek (zetoumen) something more, the good in
4
Here I follow W.D. Ross’s translation, from “The Basic Works of Aristotle,” ed. by Richard McKeon (Random
House, 1941).
5
Ross’s translation. Ostwald translates “kuria” as true, but Ross’s translation seems closer to the sense of
“authoritative” implied by the Greek.
6
Whether Aristotle means that each of us has all of these inclinations—for justice, moderation, etc.—in us already
from birth, or whether some of us have some and some, others (accounting for the different natural dispositions
or temperaments he seems to be referencing at the end of Book II. See II.7, 1107a28-1108a8; II.8, 1109a13-14;
5
�the strict sense [kurios], and to possess these qualities in a different way” (1144b6-8). In order
to achieve virtue “in the strict sense” and to come to possess a virtuous character (the virtuous
characteristics) “in another way,” according to Aristotle, we need the addition of nous
(intelligence or mind) (1144b9).
At first glance, it appears that nous should play no role in ethical virtue. For just as
Aristotle had initially drawn a sharp divide between (irrational) desire and reason (I.13 ff.; see
also 1139a3-5), so too at the beginning of Book VI he draws a sharp divide between practical
reason and theoretical reason: practical reason is concerned with things that “may be
otherwise”; theoretical reason, with “things whose first principles do not admit of being
otherwise” (1139a6-8). Action takes place within the sphere that is the concern of practical
reason; good choice and virtuous action require both ethical virtue and phronesis. Nous, on the
other hand, is knowledge of unchanging first principles (see 1140b34-45), and is thus an
excellence of theoretical reason.
And yet without including theoretical reason in virtue, we would remain forever either
as children (1144b8), or at the mercy of the chance effects of our nature and our upbringing
(III.5, ca. 1114b1). In fact, although Aristotle opens Book VI with the ostensible purpose of
defining virtuous practical reason (phronesis) in part by distinguishing it from other kinds of
intellectual excellences, by the end of Book VI he is articulating the necessary role that
theoretical reason has to play in phronesis and for human beings to become truly good and to
act truly virtuously. And it is as he arrives at this conclusion that Aristotle truly answers the
objection from Book III. For the objection implicitly denied that human beings have the
capacity for theoretical reflection on and investigation of the good, insisting instead that we are
slaves either to our upbringing or to our natures, or both.
Even more importantly, however, it is especially fitting—and telling, in order to refute
the objection from Book III—that Aristotle assigns nous as the kind of thinking and knowledge
that we need to transform our natural dispositions into true ethical virtue. For nous is
knowledge of the truth of ultimate first principles (we find Aristotle attributing to nous
knowledge of “to eschaton” as well as of “archai”; see, e.g., VI.6, 1141a8; VI.11, 1143a29). In
II.9, 1109b2-28), he does not make clear. The point, however, is that the natural inclination or disposition alone
does not constitute the “orexin orthen” necessary for ethical virtue and truly virtuous action.
6
�the case of a universally acknowledged topic of theoretical reason, such as geometry or
mathematics (see VI.8, 1142a13), nous would know the first principles (as opposed to science,
episteme, which must simply presuppose them: NE 1139b30; Meta IV, 1005a12-14); science
would know and be able to show apodeictically what follows from those first principles; and
one would have sophia when one had both nous and episteme together (see VI.7, 1141a17-18:
“it is necessary for the wise man to know not only what follows from first principles, but also
that he have the truth concerning the first principles”).
But what kind of knowledge is “nous”? Aristotle says that it is knowledge (or, many wish
to claim, intuition or insight) into “ta eschata”—“ultimate particulars,” which may mean either
ultimate facts (a particular in all of its idiosyncratic particularity) or first principles. Nous is the
knowledge of both (1143a35-36). It is not, however, as science is, apodeictic. For many
interpreters, what this leaves is that it is a kind of intuition, as Aristotle speaks of “the eye of
the soul” which “sees” the end, which is the guiding principle (arche) of the truly phronimos
decision and virtuous action (1144a28-1144b1). To understand this “eye of the soul” as [mere]
intuition, however, seems to fit more with the way Aristotle spoke in Book III than with the
account he is developing in Book VI. For in Book III, when Aristotle was giving voice to the
skeptical objection about whether we could ever know the true (now called “kurios”) good, or
whether we were confined to only the seeming good, he did his best to develop and support
the objector’s contention as much as possible. Thus, we hear him saying there that “the aiming
at the end is not self-chosen [authairetos], one must be born, as it were [hosper], having the
vision [opsin] by which to judge beautifully and to choose what is truly good; and he is wellendowed by nature in whom this grows beautifully” (1114b6-8). Here in Book VI, however, the
keen “vision of the soul” is not a gift of nature, but an achievement of theoretical reason (nous).
To understand this, we need to recognize, and Aristotle does draw our attention to this, that
deductive thinking or demonstration is not the only kind of thinking that is possible; there is
also inductive thinking (epagoge): “induction is the principle (arche) of [knowledge of] the
universal; whereas demonstration proceeds from universals” (1139b28-29). 7 One is reminded
here of Socrates’ description, when he is discussing the divided line in Republic Book VI, of how
7
Following Ross’s translation.
7
�one proceeds in the highest part of the intelligible realm: beginning from hypotheses, one
makes one’s way to the unhypothetical archen (Rep VI.510b6-7). When one arrives at the end
of epagoge (induction), one “sees” the principle (arche), which seems to mean, it is obvious, it
can be nothing else. And this might be why Aristotle calls nous a perception (aesthesis) at one
point (1143b5). As he explains, it is not perception literally, namely, the kind associated with
our five senses. Rather, it is the kind of perceiving we do “when we perceive that the triangle is
the ultimate [figure]” (1142a27-29).8 To arrive at nous requires a process of thinking, a process
of moving from particular to universal (see Post.An. II.19, esp. 100a14-100b3), “and this process
does not cease until the indivisible concepts, the true universals, are established” (Post.An.
100b2). This is the kind of thinking, Aristotle seems to say by the end of Book VI, that is
essential if one is to have the possibility of achieving true virtue, kuria arête, which involves
knowledge of what is truly good. But investigation into what is truly good is precisely what
Aristotle is engaged in in the Nicomachean Ethics, as he explores the question of what is the
highest human good, the highest end of action. The Ethics, therefore, offers both an account
and an example of what one must consider and how one’s investigation must proceed if one
truly wishes to come to know the first principles, or the archai, and it makes it clear that what
we need to do is to investigate and examine our hypotheses (or opinions or experiences—
whatever we have gathered) if we are to arrive at these first principles.
In the Metaphysics Aristotle calls the kind of thinking that investigates archai
“philosophy” (1005b7). Many take this to be an exclusive category, available only to a few.
And perhaps in the highest sense, philosophy is only available to a few. But beginning as he did
in the Nicomachean Ethics with the function of human being, the work of which human being
as human being is capable, Aristotle seems to be offering to us at the same time a more
comprehensive account. For his argument suggests that human beings in general (that is, as a
genus) have the capacity to wonder whether their understanding of the good is in fact correct
(see 1144b6-7: though we are born with some natural virtue, nevertheless “we seek something
more…”). We have this capacity because we have theoretical reason: this allows us to begin
from particulars and arrive at universals; we desire and pursue particular goods, but are also
8
Here, I follow Ostwald. See also his note 37 about this passage.
8
�able to wonder about and inquire into “the good life.” Theoretical reason makes it possible for
us to seek to support and defend the views we already have, but it also makes it possible for us
to envision and explore other possibilities. Any human being who wonders if his understanding
of the good is correct has already broken out of the deterministic cave articulated by the
objector in Book III. But this possibility, Aristotle seems to be saying, is within all of us, it is part
of what a human being is.
However long the path toward nous may be, the tools for beginning on this path are
already within us: they include the innate desire for the good, together with the capacity for
thinking, both of particulars and of universals, both practically and theoretically. What we need
in order to develop these tools, and our capacities is not more habituators. What we need are
individuals who will prod and prompt us to question and investigate, and share with us the best
examples they have experienced and learned so that we too may learn from them.
The journey from where he began at the end of Book I, to where he arrives by the end
of Book VI, is a long one. And yet Aristotle encapsulates it in one word. Where originally he
had said that “virtue is in accordance with [kata] correct reason,” he now says that “our
disposition is virtuous only if united with [meta] correct reason” (1144b26-27). “In accordance
with” was consonant with his likening the desiring part of the soul to a child. “United with,” on
the other hand, suggests a joint purpose, a functioning-together of character and reason
without which we cannot fulfill our ergon or achieve the good.
--Evanthia Speliotis
Bellarmine University
September 2014
9
�
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"What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers
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Having the capacity for theoretical reason
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Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Evanthia Speliotis at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus.
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Piety, Knowledge, and Critical Inquiry in Plato’s Euthyphro (with reference to Plato’s Apology)
David Shiner
Shimer College
For those of us who are deeply committed to the practice of critical inquiry, few if any texts
are more valuable than the dialogues of Plato. Indeed, the conventional emphasis on the
role of critical inquiry in Plato’s dialogues, justified though it unquestionably is, may at
times lead to us to undervalue their many other virtues. The signal importance of those
other virtues is brought to light when it becomes clear that they are bound up with the very
raison d’etre for the sort of critical inquiry that Socrates employs in most of the Platonic
writings. To illustrate this, I shall in this paper briefly examine the relationship between
Socrates’ practice of critical inquiry and the virtues of piety and a proper approach to
knowledge claims in Plato’s Euthyphro, while also referencing his Apology.
The Euthyphro begins with the title character greeting Socrates outside the court where he
(Socrates) is about to be tried. Each man tells the other why he is there. Socrates recounts
some of the charges against him, charges which will be familiar to readers of Plato’s
Apology, the action of which occurs directly after the events presented in the Euthyphro: he
corrupts the youth of Athens by inventing new gods and failing to acknowledge the old ones
(3A). For his part, Euthyphro says that he has come to the court to prosecute his father for
manslaughter. When Socrates expresses surprise at this, Euthyphro, claiming to be an
expert in religious matters, responds that he is undertaking this action in accordance with
divine law. Socrates responds by proposing that he become Euthyphro’s pupil so that he
can argue in court that he regards it to be “of great importance to know about things
divine” (5A), which will presumably undermine the charge of impiety which his accusers
have levied against him. The remainder of the dialogue consists primarily in Socrates
questioning Euthyphro, presumably as pupil to teacher. Euthyphro proves unable to provide
an account of piety that satisfies the standards of Socratic inquiry, and the dialogue ends
without any such account having been given.
That is to say, there is no overt account of piety in the dialogue that is to be regarded as
satisfactory. Is there, however, a covert account, an implicit conception of piety that reveals
itself upon deeper investigation? And, if there is indeed such an account, how might it be
related to the sort of critical inquiry that Socrates undertakes within the dialogue?
We’ll begin our exploration of these questions by examining the textual evidence
concerning Euthyphro’s claim to be a religious expert. As was previously noted, Euthyphro
1
�justifies his prosecution of his father by referring to divine law. In explaining this to
Socrates, he acknowledges that all of his relatives disagree with his action, likewise on
religious grounds; they have unanimously told him that “for a son to prosecute his father as
a murderer is impious” (4D). Upon hearing this, Socrates asks Euthyphro whether he has
“such an accurate knowledge of divine things” that he has no fear that he might in fact be
committing an act of impiety (4E). Euthyphro reaffirms his confidence in his decision,
claiming that his knowledge of divine matters makes him better than “the general run of
men” (5A), presumably including the rest of his family.
Plato provides ample evidence that Euthyphro’s claim should be regarded with suspicion.
Earlier in the dialogue, Euthyphro tells Socrates that he (Euthyphro) has the gift of
prophesy, boasting, “I have never made a prediction that did not come true” (3C). Shortly
thereafter Socrates says about his court case, “[T]here is no knowing how the case will turn
out. Only you prophets can tell.” Euthyphro responds, “Well, Socrates, I dare say that
nothing will come of it. Very likely you will carry your case” (3E). Given that any reader of
this dialogue would be well aware of Socrates’ subsequent conviction and execution at the
hands of the Athenian court, Plato could hardly have made Euthyphro’s lack of prophetic
ability plainer. This episode casts considerable doubt on subsequent claims Euthyphro
makes concerning his religious expertise, which in turn implies that his confidence in those
claims is unwarranted.
After proposing that Euthyphro become his teacher, Socrates asks him to state what piety
is. Euthyphro replies by recounting the well-known story from Greek mythology in which
Zeus bound his father, Cronos, in chains for wronging him, just as Cronos had previously
castrated his father, Ouranos, for similar reasons. Socrates responds by asking Euthyphro
whether he thinks that he (Socrates) is being brought to trial because he “somehow” finds it
difficult to accept such stories of the gods. He then concedes that he might be wrong to
doubt those stories, stating that if experts on religion, such as Euthyphro claims to be,
believe them, he (Socrates) will be duty-bound to believe them as well. This, he says, is
because his is “ignorant about these matters” (6B). Thus, Socrates’ awareness of his own
ignorance leads him not only to doubt received wisdom, but even to doubt his own doubts.
With this response, Socrates tacitly draws a clear distinction between Euthyphro and
himself. Euthyphro claims to know everything worth knowing about piety. Socrates, on the
contrary, claims to know nothing about it. On the basis of his claim to possess religious
knowledge, Euthyphro is certain that he is practicing piety in prosecuting his father, in part
on the basis of the analogy of himself with Zeus, the all-knowing. On the basis of his claim
to lack religious knowledge, Socrates professes his uncertainty not only about the veracity
2
�of the traditional stories of the gods, but also about his doubts about those stories.
Therefore, as Socrates states explicitly, if Euthyphro actually has the knowledge that he
claims to have, his knowledge will trump Socrates’ ignorance, and Socrates will be dutybound to follow his lead.
The key word here is “if.” Socrates sets forth all of his conditions hypothetically, setting the
stage for him to try, throughout the rest of the dialogue, to discover whether Euthyphro can
demonstrate that he actually has the knowledge that he claims to have. In so doing,
Socrates doesn’t simply accept Euthyphro’s stories, or for that matter anything Euthyphro
says about piety, “on faith,” as we might put it. Such acceptance would constitute an appeal
to exactly the sort of unquestioning certainty which Socrates rejects, since he, as a
professed non-knower with respect to such matters, wouldn’t have any basis on which to
accept it.
By asking Euthyphro whether he thinks that he (Socrates) is being prosecuted for impiety
because he has difficulty in believing the traditional stories of the gods, Socrates shifts the
conversation from a declarative to an interrogative mode. He also subtly and skillfully shifts
the subject of the conversation from piety itself to the status of knowledge claims about
piety. In doing this, Socrates paves the way for critical inquiry, which entails a shift in the
conversation from statements of traditional belief to hypotheses.
Statements of traditional belief, such as those Euthyphro favors, are authoritative and
presumptively non-disverifiable propositions. The hypothetical approach, on the other
hand, regards such statements as assumptions, and thus as subject to critical inquiry. In
highlighting the shift from traditional belief to critical inquiry, Plato regularly makes it clear
where Socrates doubts, and where Euthyphro – and we – should do likewise. For example,
when Euthyphro exhibits confidence in the veracity of the traditional stories of quarrels
between the gods, Socrates notes that this characterization of the gods would put them in
the same position as human disputants “if they really do have quarrels about right and
wrong, as you say they do” (8D). The key word here is, again, “if.” This and subsequent
instances of classifying statements about the disputes of the gods as assumptions, rather
than as statements to be accepted on the basis of authority and/or tradition, clearly
differentiate Socrates from Euthyphro with respect to their approaches to the kinds of
knowledge claims that Euthyphro routinely makes. Euthyphro professes certainty that the
gods engage in disputes with each other; in fact, he tells Socrates that he knows much more
about those disputes than the ordinary Athenian does (6B). Socrates, on the other hand,
exhibits the intellectual humility appropriate for a professed noon-knower by neither
3
�affirming nor denying this claim but rather regarding it as an assumption and therefore in
need of further investigation.
Critical inquiry depends upon the hypothetical mode championed by Socrates; the
recounting of traditional myths set forth as matters of fact eschews it. Euthyphro evidently
fails to recognize the disjunction between the two in agreeing to submit his beliefs to
critical inquiry. His consent and even encouragement of critical inquiry throughout the
dialogue, while simultaneously preserving confidence in his infallibility with respect to
divine matters, indicates that he has no real understanding of the nature of the
hypothetical realm. He is evidently unaware that submitting his beliefs to critical inquiry
potentially undermines them by converting them into hypothetical statements – that is,
assumptions which could be otherwise. This lack of awareness on Euthyphro’s part appears
to be a byproduct of his confidence in his claims of knowledge, and Plato gives us ample
evidence that this confidence is unwarranted. That evidence includes Euthyphro’s
demonstrably false claim of unerring prophesy, his presumptuous assertion that he is
permitted, indeed expected, to act in the same manner as the king of the gods, and his
manifest inability to present a definition of piety that can satisfy the rigors of critical inquiry.
Euthyphro continues to proclaim confidence in his knowledge of divine matters throughout
the dialogue, and the fact that he is still making this claim as the dialogue approaches its
end (13E) indicates that he has learned little if anything along the way. Socrates’ final
statements to him demonstrate this in several ways, not the least of which is – again – their
hypothetical character. First, he exhorts Euthyphro to tell him the “absolute truth” about
the gods because “if anyone knows, of all mankind, it is you” (15D). This statement, we can
reliably conclude on the basis of Euthyphro’s utter failure to satisfactorily demonstrate his
alleged knowledge, invokes an implicit conclusion based on the logical form known as
modus tollens. The content of that syllogism is this: If anyone knows the truth about the
gods, Euthyphro knows it (as Socrates states); Euthyphro doesn’t know it (as the dialogue
makes abundantly clear); therefore no one knows it. Next, Socrates turns Euthyphro’s claim
to possess religious knowledge into another hypothetical: “If you didn’t know precisely
what is pious and impious, it is unthinkable that...you would ever have moved to prosecute
your aged sire” (15D). This statement implies a sort of modus ponens: after all that has
transpired, Euthyphro should recognize that he does not in fact know what he claims (or
claimed) to know about piety and impiety, the consequence of which is that he should not
have prosecuted his father in accordance with what he thought were the dictates of piety.
The fact that Euthyphro has made no evident progress during the course of the dialogue
leads Socrates to say to him, “I am sure you think you know exactly what is pious and what
4
�is not” (15E). This phrasing acknowledges the fact that Euthyphro continues to think he
knows what he claims to know, although it is by now equally evident that he does not
actually know it. Euthyphro has been shorn of his knowledge claims – not by Socrates, but
by his own shortcomings as disclosed by critical inquiry.
From this examination of the Euthyphro we might be inclined to infer that critical inquiry
and piety are at odds, and that the former has trumped the latter in this dialogue. More
specifically, since it appears that an uncritical piety such as Euthyphro’s cannot be
maintained in the face of critical inquiry, we might wonder whether critical inquiry must
perforce be impious. Such a conclusion would be unwarranted. In order to understand the
proper relationship between the two, we must turn from the Euthyphro to its sequel, both
in time and, we might say, complementarity: the Apology, Plato’s account of Socrates’
defense in court.
Early in the Apology, Socrates endeavors to account for the reputation that has rendered
him subject to prosecution on the grounds of impiety. As he tells the Athenian jury, “I have
gained this reputation, gentlemen, from nothing more or less than a kind of wisdom. What
kind of wisdom do I mean? Human wisdom, I suppose. It seems that I really am wise in this
limited sense” (20D). By way of contrast, concerning “wisdom that is more than human,”
Socrates says, “I certainly have no knowledge of such wisdom” (20E). How, then, does
Socrates know that he has any wisdom at all? Because “the god at Delphi,” presumably
Apollo, had famously told his friend Chaerephon many years earlier that no one was wiser
than Socrates (21A).
In Plato’s account, Socrates’ reaction to the oracle’s declaration is typical: he wonders
about it. As he tells the jury, “I said to myself, ‘What does the god mean? Why does he not
use plain language? I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small,
so what can he mean by asserting that I am the wisest man in the world?’” (21B). So he
wanders about Athens trying to better understand the truth of the god’s declaration by
asking questions of people who claim to be knowledgeable about various matters. In other
words, Socrates responds to a knowledge claim by wondering about the meaning of the
claim, asserting the insufficiency of his own knowledge, and investigating the claim by
means of critical inquiry – that is, by undertaking the same process he effected with
Euthyphro. The only significant difference is that here, unlike in the Euthyphro, Socrates
seems to take for granted that the oracle’s claim must be true if properly understood; as he
says, the god “cannot be telling a lie” because “that would not be right for him” (21B). In
other words, piety demands that Socrates treat a truth claim by a god differently from a
5
�truth claim by a human being. Nevertheless, intellectual humility and critical inquiry are
present in essentially the same way in both dialogues.
Why, then, does Socrates initiate critical inquiry with his fellow Athenians? A number of
passages in the Apology leave no room for doubt: he sees it a religious quest (“I pursued my
investigation at the god’s command” (22A)). Once Socrates discovers the meaning of the
oracle, namely that “real wisdom is the property of God, and…human wisdom has little or
no value” (23A), his response is “to give aid to the god” by “undertaking service on the
god’s behalf” (23B). This service, which is prominently displayed in numerous other Platonic
dialogues, consists in this: “[W]hen I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the
cause of God by proving that he is not” (23C). He even goes so far as to affirm that “God
appointed me…to the duty of living the philosophic life, examining myself and others”
(28E). Critical inquiry is therefore a religious obligation for Socrates, one that he willingly
takes on even though he, as a mere mortal, does not know exactly what the divine law is –
and, unlike Euthyphro, does not claim to know.
Socrates does not profess complete ignorance about divine matters. Indeed he cannot do
so, for that would render his claim to be undertaking a religious quest nonsensical. The
basic truths about the gods that he claims to know include, for example, that they are
responsible for all the good things that we humans possess (Euthyphro 15A) and that they
cannot lie because it would not be right for them to do so (Apology 21B). But, unlike
Euthyphro, he also believes that our understanding of the nature and activities of the gods
is extremely limited, and that recognition of that limitation is a sign of the proper
intellectual humility which is an essential feature of both piety and human wisdom. And so
Socrates’ wisdom is the result of a religious quest, a demonstration of his piety as well as of
his intellectual humility. This stands in stark contrast with Euthyphro, whose lack of wisdom
is manifest in the opposite traits, as well as of Socrates’ accusers in the Athenian court.
To conclude: In both the Euthyphro and the Apology, Plato demonstrates that Socrates
doubts the traditional stories of the gods not because he is not pious, but because he is. In
conducting his investigations, Socrates provides a model of the proper relationship between
piety and critical inquiry. The lynchpin between them is intellectual humility, which stands
in stark contrast to the vacuous arrogance demonstrated by Euthyphro, as well as by
Socrates’ accusers. In order to follow the model of the quest for knowledge that Plato
proposes and Socrates personifies, one need not practice piety or critical inquiry in precisely
the way that Socrates does; but one must set out on that quest with an uncommon level of
commitment, and with genuine humility. This is where liberal education begins.
6
�
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Piety, knowledge, and critical inquiry in Plato's Euthyphro (with reference to Plato's Apology)
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Julie C. Park
Lecturer, Collegiate Seminar
Saint Mary's College of California
Panel: Religious Texts within the Liberal Arts
Title: Homer's Polytheism
Questions
It is difficult to teach religious books in a liberal arts classroom. The difficulty has to do with
the way they are read outside the classroom, where reading religious books is often a form of
devotion. This devotion assumes a belief in the God of the book, and a faith that the book is true.
Students tend to bring this assumption with them into the classroom. So they have a hard time seeing
the point of reading the books of other religions. Why should they read books they don't think are
true? What is the point of their reading stories about gods in which they do not believe?
One common answer appeals to mutual understanding and respect. Reading the books of
other religions helps students understand and respect other people. This is true. But approaching
religious books in this way prevents us from engaging in an actual dialogue with the books. Rather
than approaching the books as possible sources of truth, this approach reduces them to sources of
interesting information about other people's errors and delusions.
The difficulty is especially acute in the case of Homer. When I teach Homer, students tend to
ask two basic questions. My theist students ask why they should read Homer if they do not believe
in the Homeric gods. And my atheist students ask why they have to read Homer if they don't believe
in any gods at all. If we do not believe in the gods of a religion, how can we engage in a genuine
dialogue with its books? How can we read such books as possible sources of truth?
Two Steps
The first step toward an answer to this question is simple: We have to shift from the question
of belief to the question of understanding. Understanding in the most basic sense is prior to belief.
In order to either believe or disbelieve in a god, we have to first assume a basic understanding of
who or what a god is. This basic understanding may be shared by both believers and unbelievers.
�For example, theists in the Abrahamic traditions affirm the existence of God, and atheists in the
Abrahamic traditions deny the existence of God, but both theists and atheists take for granted an
understanding of the nature of the God whose existence they affirm or deny. Questions of
understanding at this level precede questions of belief or unbelief. This is especially true in reading
Homer, who did not "believe in" the gods in the sense that Christians believe in God. Eva Brann
makes this point in her book, Homeric Moments: "The mode of belief or disbelief is in fact quite
misapplied here. The Homeric gods are not 'believed in'" in the same way that the God of Abraham
requires (Homeric Moments, 36). So the first step is to show our students that, before we can
meaningfully believe or disbelieve in the existence of the Homeric gods, we first have to understand
the nature of the Homeric gods--we have to understand who or what they are.
A second step is to show that to understand Homer we have to suspend our understanding of
divinity--our assumptions about the nature of the gods. If we uncritically assume an Abrahamic
understanding of divinity, for example, we will never be able to take the Homeric gods seriously. A
perfect example of this lack of seriousness is the article on atheism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. The article informs us that the gods of Homer are so far from the God of Abraham that
they are not really gods at all. I quote:
"Atheism" means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God. I shall
here assume that the God in question is that of a sophisticated monotheism. The
tribal gods of the early inhabitants of Palestine are of little or no philosophical
interest... Similarly the Greek and Roman gods were more like mythical heroes and
heroines than like the omnipotent, omniscient and good God postulated by medieval
and modern philosophy. 1
In other words, the gods of Homer are so ungodlike, so unworthy of being taken seriously, that there
is no point even bothering to deny they exist. This is a textbook example of ethnocentric blindness.
We cannot understand Homer if we uncritically take for granted an Abrahamic understanding of the
divine. In order to engage in a dialogue with Homer--to approach Homer as a possible source of
truth--we have to try to explicate and clarify the understanding of divinity implicit in Homer's work.
To do this we have to suspend our assumptions about the divine, and ask very simply: Who
or what is a god in Homer? What for Homer is the essence of the divine?
�The Gods in Homer
When we first start reading Homer we are struck by something strange: Homer considers
divine a number of beings that we don't consider divine at all. First, there are the supernatural beings
who live on Olympus, who to us seem more human than godlike. But second, he sees as "gods" the
kinds of beings that we consider natural phenomena, such as the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and the
winds. And third, he also sees as "gods" the kinds of beings that we would call psychological, such
as Sleep, Dream, Persuasion, Conflict, Panic, Rout, and Grief.
Why does Homer see these beings as gods? What for Homer makes them all divine? What
are the core traits that all these gods share in common?
I think the meaning of divinity, for Homer, is implicit in the epithets he gives to the gods.
Homer uses three main epithets. The first epithet is that the gods are "the immortals." The second
epithet is that they are "the stronger ones." And the third epithet is that the gods are "the givers of
gifts." These epithets point to the three traits that for Homer are essential to divinity.
The first trait is immortality. A being is not divine unless it is immortal.
The second trait is superhuman strength. A being is divine if it is stronger than human
beings, and if human beings are under its power.
The third trait is generosity. A being is divine if it gives to humans what humans cannot give
to themselves. The gods are the source of our gifts and of the givens of human existence.
This is why the Sun is a god: it is immortal; it is stronger than us, and it gives us light. This is
why Sleep is divine: it never dies; it's a power that overcomes us; and it gives us rest and
rejuvenation. This is why Eros is a god: it has been around forever; it's a power that takes possession
of us and drives us insane; and it is something we cannot summon at will, and that comes over us
whether we want it to or not.
This account of the Homeric gods helps students see how the question of understanding
precedes the question of belief. The challenge of Homer is not that we do not believe in the
existence of the Homeric gods. Everyone believes in the existence of the Sun, and of Sleep, and of
�Eros. The challenge of Homer is that he has a different understanding of divinity, and a different
vision of the place of gods in human existence.
So the question is not: Do we believe that the Homeric gods exist?
Instead the question is: How does Homer understand divinity and humanity? And to what
extent can we retrieve and share this understanding? What does this understanding of gods and men
illuminate about human existence? How does it shed light on the world in which we live?
Four Dimensions of Homeric Thought
I would argue that Homer's understanding of the gods has four distinct dimensions. At
different moments he understands the gods in four distinct but related ways. There is an explanatory
dimension of Homer's thought; there is a descriptive dimension; there is an ethical dimenion of
Homeric thinking. And a fourth dimension of Homeric theology I would call contemplative.
Let me go through these four dimension of Homer's thought one at a time.
The Explanatory Dimension of Homer's Thought
The most obvious aspect of Homer's thought is the explanatory dimension. Homer invokes
the gods to explain why events happen as they do. The gods in this sense are the invisible causes of
otherwise inexplicable events. If something happens for no obvious human or natural reason, that
happening is explained as the action of a god.
For example, at the start of The Iliad the Greek soldiers are dying of sickness. Why?
According to Homer, it is not because their food is rotten and they are living in filth. It is because
Apollo is angry that Agamemnon disrespected his priest, and the plague is Apollo's punishment.
Notice that the explanatory dimension of Homeric thought is confined to the Olympian gods.
Homer describes only the Olympian gods as acting in this way--taking the initiative and intervening
in human affairs.2 It is true that the non-Olympian gods, such as Sleep or Dream, also intervene in
human life, but they do so as agents of the Olympians. When Delusion comes over Agamemnon,
�for example, Delusion is acting as the agent of Zeus. Likewise when Eros and Sleep come over
Zeus, for example, they are merely the agents of Aphrodite and Hera. When the West Wind keeps
the fleets at Aulis, it is acting on behalf of Artemis. Homer never attributes agency to anything that
we would call a natural or psychological phenomenon. The Olympian gods are always the cause of
anything extraordinary done by the non-Olympian gods.
Today we find it hard to take seriously this side of Homer's thought. Science offers better
explanations than stories about the gods. If the Greek soldiers got sick, it was probably because they
were living in filth and eating rotten food. If they blamed Apollo for their sickness, it was probably
because they were scapegoating Agamemnon. Gods had nothing to do with it. At the level of
explanatory thought, it seems, we understand the Greeks better than they understood themselves.
I would argue, however, that even in the explanatory dimension, Homer's theology
sometimes holds insights that are worth taking seriously. But to see this we first have to understand
the other dimensions of Homer's thought.
The Descriptive Dimension of Homer's Thought
There is also a descriptive dimension to Homer's thinking about the gods. Homer uses stories
of the gods to describe certain kinds of experience. We often have the experience of powers that
come over us and overcome us, that take possession of us and alter our attunement to the world:
sleep, dream, persuasion, delusion, lust, eros, inspiration, and insight. Under the influence of these
powers, and in light of their presence, the world appears differently to us, and we do things that we
would never do if we were not under their sway. When Homer speaks of the gods, he is sometimes
merely describing these experiences of being subject to powers beyond our control.
The obvious example is Hypnos, which we call sleep. Sleep is a power that comes over us
and overcomes us. We cannot summon it at will, but we cannot resist it for long. When we deprive
ourselves of sleep the world starts to seem crummy and depressing. When we surrender to sleep,
after weeks of deprivation, we wake up and the world seems wonderful again. At the start of each
semester, my students have a hard time understanding how sleep could be seen as a god. But at the
�end of the semester, after too many late nights, they understand that sleep is divine.
Another example is the Muse, the source of what we call "inspiration." When he speaks of
the Muses, Homer is simply naming the powers that inspire great art. We cannot summon these
powers at will, but we can create the conditions under which they are most likely to come over us.
And when inspiration comes to us, it alters our vision and enables us to do what we could never do
through willpower alone. Nietzsche gave a very precise description of this experience in Ecce
Homo.3
A third example is Aphrodite, which we call "sexual attraction." Remember the story that
Homer tells in The Iliad of Aphrodite coming to Helen in the person of her maid, who uses her
words to arouse her desire for Paris. It is clear that the presence of Aphrodite simply stands for the
power of desire. In this story we recognize a description of a universal human experience--the
experience of being overwhelmed with lust for a person one does not respect or even especially like.
A last example is Athena, the name Homer gives to what we call skill or insight. Think of the
time when Athena came to Telemachus in the person of Mentes, an old friend of Odysseus. The
words of Mentes ignited a moment of clarity for Telemachus, who suddenly saw himself and his
situation in a new light: "[S]he left in his spirit determination and courage, and he remembered his
father even more than he had before, and he guessed the meaning, and his heart was full of wonder,
for he thought it was a divinity" (1: 320-323).
This descriptive dimension of Homer's thought has nothing supernatural about it.4 Each of
these stories of the gods simply describes a common and recognizable human experience--the
experience of being overcome by and under the influence of powers beyond our control. Homeric
theology illuminates this part of human existence as much today as it did thousands of years ago.
The Ethical Dimension of Homer's Thought
There is also an ethical dimension to Homer's vision of the gods. The ethical significance of
Homeric theology is hard to see, because the gods do things that are obviously immoral. And not
�just immoral according to our moral code, but immoral according to the morality of Homer himself:
Aphrodite cheats on her husband; Hera lies to Zeus; Athena deceives Pandarus. The Homeric gods
are not morally perfect; if anything they are bad role models for human beings.
But while they are ambiguous with respect to moral behavior, the Olympian gods are
superlative with respect to human excellence. Their home on Olympus, the highest mountain in
Greece, implies that they are "higher" than the other gods, that is, greater in virtue, honor, and
blessings. Each Olympian god exemplifies the highest virtues proper to a specific domain of human
existence. Athena exemplifies superlative wisdom. Aphrodite exemplifies superlative beauty.
Hephaistos exemplifies superlative craftsmanship. Hera exemplifies superlative sovereignty within
the domestic sphere. Together the Olympian gods embody a vision of human life at its highest.
This dimension of Homer's thought is both strange and familiar. It is strange since Homer
obviously values moral rectitude less than excellence. For Homer the highest thing that humans can
aspire to is not righteousness but greatness--doing or being something better than anyone else: a
great warrior; a great athlete; a great beauty; a great poet. But this side of Homer's thought is also
familiar because many people still live by Homer's values: they have a code of morals, but the focus
and meaning of their lives is in their aspiration to greatness. Today this aspect of our lives is largely
obscured by the language of the Abrahamic tradition, which values righteousness over excellence.
Homer's theology is relevant today because it illuminates and clarifies this aspiration to greatness.
Homeric theology also helps to clarify the meaning of devotion. Homer clearly understood
that human beings cannot achieve greatness through willpower alone. In order to do or be
something better than anyone else, we need the gifts of the gods: talent, charisma, inspiration, the
surge of skill and strength that athletes call "flow." We cannot give these powers to ourselves. We
cannot summon the gods at will. But if we devote ourselves to something we love--family,
craftsmanship, music, erotics, or wisdom--if give ourselves to it, if we arrange our lives around it, if
we cultivate its virtues and engage in its practices, we can create the conditions under which it is most
likely that a god will come over us. A musician cannot summon inspiration at will, but if he devotes
his life to music, then inspiration is more likely to come. An athelete cannot choose to be in the
�flow, but if she devotes herself to a sport then moments will come when she effortlessly performs at
the highest level. A philosopher cannot make herself wise, but if she devotes her life to the search
for wisdom then at times wisdom may come as if of its own accord. To be devoted to a god is to
cultivate the conditions under which the god may come over you. To achieve greatness, we each
have to sense what we love most, what inspires and enthuses us, and we have to choose it and devote
ourselves to it with an undivided heart.
The ethical dimension of Homer's thought is illuminating in another way. Each of the
Olympian gods exemplifies the good proper to a distinct domain of human existence. All the
Olympian gods are equal--no god or goddess is higher than the others. And the gods sometimes
come in conflict with each other. If we take the descriptive dimension of Homer's thought seriously,
this means that to be human is to be drawn towards a plurality of goods, which are all equal, but
which may come into conflict with each other. Erotic love is good, marriage is good, wisdom is
good, but these three goods are not necessarily conducive to one another. At the deepest level of his
thought, Homer offers us a vision of human life: to be human is to be drawn toward and torn
between a plurality of goods.
I think this vision of human existence is implicit in the myth of the judgment of Paris. Three
goddesses--Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite--each claimed to be the most beautiful, and asked Paris to
judge between them. Each offered Paris gifts: Hera offered power; Athena offered wisdom;
Aphrodite offered him beauty. Later, when Helen met Paris she had to make the same choice: she
could choose domestic life (Hera) and wisdom (Athena); or she could choose to leave her family and
elope with a beautiful stranger (Aphrodite). Her choice mirrored the choice made by Paris when he
judged the three goddesses. The story says: to be human is to have to choose between different and
conflicting goods.
At this point we can now see more clearly the explanatory dimension of Homer's thought.
Since the story of the judgment of Paris is about the causes of the Trojan War, it is also part of the
explanatory dimension of Homer's thought. The story explains the origins of the war, not in a
pseudo-scientific way, but in a mythical way. It says the Trojan War started because humans and
�gods tried to exclude Eris, the goddess of conflict or strife, from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.
Eris came to the wedding anyway, took revenge for her exclusion by overcoming the gods and
setting them against each other. This story is not a superstition but a myth. And the myth points to a
real insight, which is that Eris, Strife or Conflict, will not be excluded. The myth tells us that Strife is
a god--a power to humans are subject, and which we fail to recognize at our peril. If we try to
exclude conflict from our lives--if we don't make a place for conflict--then conflict will overcome
and destroy us.
The Contemplative Dimension of Homer's Thought
There is a fourth side to Homer's discourse on the gods. Homer often shows the gods on
Olympus contemplating human life. The classic example occurs in Book 17 of the Iliad, when Zeus
looks down the immortal horses that belong to Achilles, and the warriors fighting over the dead
body of Patroclus. Zeus says to the horses:
Poor wretches, why then did we ever give you to the lord Peleus, a mortal man, and
you yourselves are immortal and ageless? Only so that among unhappy men you
also might be grieved? Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on
it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is (17: 442-447)
By telling a human story from the perspective of the gods, Homer invites us to imaginatively put
ourselves in their place, to contemplate human existence as though from above and outside human
life, to see our ephemeral lives from the perspective of eternity.5
Goethe recognized the contemplative dimension of Homer in a letter he wrote to Schiller in
1798. He wrote:
Your letter found me...in the Iliad, to which I always return with delight. It is always
as if one were in a balloon, far above everything earthly; as if one were truly in that
intermediate zone where the gods float hither and thither. (Hadot, PWL 238)
The Iliad has the power to raise us above everyday life and let us contemplate human existence as
though from above and from the outside. In his book, Poetry and Truth, Goethe wrote that this
power is essential to all true poetry.
True poetry can be recognized by the fact that, like a secular Gospel, through the
�inner cheerfulness and outward pleasure it procures us, it can free us from the
mundane burdens which weigh upon us. Like a hot-air balloon, it lifts us up into
higher regions, along with the ballast that clings to us, and lets us see, from a birdseye-view, the mad labyrinths of the world spread out before us. (Hadot, PWL 239)
I think that Goethe here is only half right. It is true that the Iliad lifts us up and lets us contemplate
human life as though from Olympus. But it also shows us the world from the perspective of
Achilles, who knows he has only a few more weeks to live. The emotional power of the poem
comes from this stark juxtaposition of perspectives, so that it lets us see the world from the
perspective of eternity and from the perspective of men on the threshold of death.
Conclusion
Let me conclude with my original question: How to teach religious texts in a liberal arts
classroom? How can we approach texts from other religious traditions as possible sources of insight?
My answer is that we have to take two steps. First, we have to shift our focus from questions
of belief to questions of understanding. Second, we have to suspend our inherited understanding of
the divine, and to be open to radically different views about the meaning of divinity. If we approach
Homer in this way, we find that his theology illuminates human life in a number of ways.
First, Homer's descriptions of divine possession illuminate a kind of human experience--the
experience of being overcome by powers that exceed our control, in whose light the world appears
differently to us, and under whose influence we act in ways we would never act on our own.
Second, Homer's stories of the gods convey not just a general ethos but a number of specific
ethical insights. They illuminate the aspiration to greatness, our inability to reach greatness through
our efforts alone, the meaning of devotion, and the tragic necessity of having to decide what to
devote ourselves to. These insights belong to an ethos that illuminates a condition of human
existence--that to be human means to be drawn toward and torn between a plurality of equal but
conflicting goods.
Third, the figures of the Olympian gods articulate the power of human self-transcendence-our power to see human life as though from outside and above, from the perspective of eternity, and
also to see life as though from the end of life and the threshold of death.
�By shifting our focus from questions of belief to questions of understanding, by suspending
our assumptions about the meaning of divinity, by opening ourselves to and making our own a
different understanding of divinity, we can approach religious texts from other traditions as partners
in a genuine dialogue, that is, as sources of genuine self-understanding and truth.
Notes
1.
Smart, J. J. C., "Atheism and Agnosticism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring
2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/atheismagnosticism/).
2.
A non-Olympian god in Homer hardly ever acts on his or her own initiative. One exception
is when Odysseus swims ashore in the Odyssey and the river listens to him. So the non-Olympian
god can sometimes have some kind of agency. Eris, or Strife, is also an exception, one that, I would
argue, proves the rule.
3.
Nietzsche writes, "Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of
what poets of strong ages called inspiration?... The concept of revelation, in the sense that something
suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes
and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes,
one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly
formed" (Ecce Homo, p. 72).
4.
Eva Brann similarly argues, "nothing is ever done that could not have been done by the
humans themselves" (Homeric Moments, 43).
5.
See also Book 1: 498-499, Book 5: 753-754, and Book 11: 79-83.
Secondary Sources
Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (2002)
Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (1985)
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, All Things Shining (2011)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as quoted in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995)
Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero: In 24 Hours (2013)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Seth Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad (1984)
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men (1999)
�
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Insights into the Essence of General Education
Pang Haishao
(Professor，School of Education, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081)
Abstract：There are various correct and incorrect interpretations of general education. A vague
understanding definitely has a negative impact on the practice of general education. This paper
starts off by analyzing the connotations behind the Chinese equivalent of the term "general
education" and goes on to suggest that general education be understood from three aspects in line
of China's actual situations: (1) General education is a philosophy for education and emphasizes
putting people first to cultivate complete people; (2) General education frequently refers to the
content taught to achieve the goals of general education; (3) General education can mean a model
for cultivating talents which reflects the philosophy of general education, achieves its goals, and
provides a supporting system.
Key words general education, suzhi education, education philosophy
People have various correct or incorrect opinions about general education: education that covers
all kinds of knowledge; education that focuses on common sense and practical skills; education
that combines humanities and sciences to extend students' visions and edify their minds; education
that equals cultural quality education; education that carries on, enjoys, and develops lifestyles
that are part of human civilization; education that cultivates wisdom and virtues to foster noble
personalities; education that just means elective courses; education that goes far beyond public
courses, elective courses, or lectures; education that is not all-inclusive and means more than a
wide scope of knowledge; education that does not target pragmatism; education that provides the
modern society with excellent citizens; education that all university students should receive;
education for the elite; education that is not just for the elite and should take different contents and
forms at universities of different types at different levels; education that does not distinguish
between majors or vocations; education that underlies and supplements specialized studies...1
Obviously, the jury is out with different and sometimes conflicting ideas. The big question is -what is the essence of general education?
I. The Term "General Education" and its Chinese Equivalent
The Chinese equivalent of the term "general education" is a translation from American English
and also incorporates the thoughts of liberal education in ancient Greece. The term "general
education" has been translated into different things in different times, countries, and territories. In
mainland China, its previous translations meant "education for all-round talents", "ordinary
education", and "common education". In Hong Kong, its previous translations meant
About the author: Dr. Pang Haishao, Professor, Deputy Dean of School of Education, Beijing Institute of
Technology, Secretary general of Chinese Association of Liberal Education.
1
Reference source: Zhou Xiaoping’s presentation titled Three General Goals in Specialized Education at the
Across-the-Strait General Education Symposium held in October 2006 in Shunde
�Special issue
Insights into the Essence of General Education
"macro-education", "education for all-round talents", "education for complete people", and
"general education". When the concept of "general education" arrived in Japan, it was translated
into a term meaning "manner education". The term "liberal education" from ancient Greece was
translated into Chinese terms that mean "free education" or "education for knowledge and
integrity". These translations all relate to general education and have been used by different groups
of people. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that the current Chinese equivalent of general
education became widely accepted and used in Chinese communities.
Scholars from Taiwan drew on the traditional Chinese culture to explicate the essence of general
education in depth. Guo Weifan2 gave the following explanation: general education is education
that enables people to understand and fuse all kinds of knowledge and visions. Therefore, general
education does not mean a superficial dip into every area of knowledge. Instead, it depends on a
systematic approach to design liberal education courses and, through integration between different
courses, serves as a guideline for students to go from a broad range to specific fields, thereby
expanding their academic visions.[1]Prof. Gao Mingshi3 from the Department of History, National
Taiwan University also provided an explanation for general education: what is "general"? Scholar
Zhang Xuecheng of the Qing dynasty quoted Shuowen Jiezi as saying "general" means
"understanding what others do not understand". Today’s problem is that students of humanities do
not understand science and engineering while students of science and engineering do not
understand humanities. This is not "general". In addition to the acquisition of knowledge, general
education is about visions. In his famous work Shi Tong, scholar Liu Zhiji of the Tang dynasty
quoted Confucius' remark "learn more and broaden your vision with goods things you have
learned" to explain that scholars know many things of the past and their essence. Scholars know so
much because they choose to know". Knowing more is a capability for talent and the basis for
"general". However, the capability to choose what to learn depends on visions.[2]The current
equivalent of the term "general education" obviously better grasps the essence of general
education and liberal education, compared with terms constrained by the words in "general
education", such as "ordinary education", "common education", "all-round talent education".
Besides, it carries on the spirit of the traditional Chinese culture.
The differences in understanding general education usually arise from different understandings of
the word "general", which is often given a Chinese equivalent meaning "common" or "ordinary".
As a result, general education was misinterpreted as common education or ordinary education, and
relevant courses were misinterpreted as ordinary common sense courses. Actually, "general" has
two major meanings according to Oxford English Dictionary:
(1) affecting all or most people, place or things; not limited to one part or aspect of a person or
things or to a particular time;
2
Guo Weifan (1937-), born in Tainan, Taiwan, graduated from the School of Education, National Taiwan Normal
University and holds a doctoral degree from the University of Paris. He studied at the Institute of Education, the
University of London. After returning to Taiwan, he became a professor with the Institute of Education at National
Taiwan Normal University and took office as the president of the university. He became a political affairs member
of the Executive Yuan in 1984 and took the concurrent post of Director of the Executive Yuan’s Cultural
Construction committee, which he started to hold full time in 1989. He was the Education Minister between March
1993 and 1996. Data source: http:// whgx.library.sh.cn, July 28, 2006.
3
Gao Mingshi, born in Qingshui of Taichung, Taiwan, graduated from the Department of History, National
Taiwan University. He obtained a doctorate from Tokyo University and later became a professor with the
Department of History, National Taiwan University.
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(2) not specialized in subject matter, not limited in range of work, use, activity, etc. These two
meanings reveal two features of general education: (a) affecting the whole and (b) specific to
specialized areas of education.
As far as the author is concerned, "general" is the method used to achieve the purpose of
knowledge and visions. General education is not just about knowledge. Instead, it is a combination
of knowledge and visions. There is frequently prejudice between people specialized in different
subjects. This is especially obvious between those specialized in natural sciences and those
specialized in humanities, creating two different cultures divided by a huge gap full of
misunderstandings. There is little communication and understanding between these two
groups.[3]One of the reasons behind this is "not general", which leads to narrow visions and biased
thoughts. The focus of general education is to broaden visions with knowledge from three main
areas -- humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Such education leads people out of
prejudice and bias and makes them become well-educated complete people. Of course, knowledge
is infinitive, and life is short. In the modern society, nobody can learn the knowledge of all
subjects. Therefore, which knowledge and ways of thinking are basic and indispensable is the
central question to be considered in the research and design of general education courses.
II. Three Aspects of General Education
The author believes general education is a historical and geographic concept that has a rich
essence with multiple aspects. General education should be understood from three aspects in line
of China's actual situation: education philosophy, education content, talent cultivating model.
1. General Education as an Education Philosophy
It is a consensus among a large number of education researchers that general education is a
philosophy for education. This gives rise to quite some questions: What is the core of general
education? Does general education mean the same thing in different times, countries or territories?
What kind of education objective does this philosophy reflect? Does general education apply to
certain universities only or is it for all schools? Is it elite education or mass education? When it
comes to the practice of a specific university, how should general education be characterized and
positioned --should it just take an auxiliary position or should it become the fundamental way for
the entire university? Is general education what university education is all about or should it
coexist with specialized education in harmony? Let’s seek the answers by looking into the
kaleidoscope of general education in the United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
Let's first look at the philosophy of general education in the United States. In some way, general
education is the result of combing liberal education and education practice in the United States.
Liberal education as advocated in ancient Greece was the product of that special section of history,
when the people who received such education were "free people" as opposed to slaves and artisans.
These people lived a comfortable life and had plenty of leisure time. The purpose of their studies
was not to make a living, but to develop rationality and perfect morality[4].As the society moved
forward, the political, economic, and cultural foundations of traditional liberal education gradually
disappeared. There were no more privileged classes like "free people" and nobles. Liberal
education was no longer limited to the few free people. Instead, it became available to all citizens.
Education was no longer exclusive of livelihood and pragmatism.
�Special issue
Insights into the Essence of General Education
In the 20th century, Robert M. Hutchins (1899-1977), who had a fundamental impact on
university thoughts in the United States, earnestly advocated general education. In his opinion,
general education is for everyone and useful for them no matter whether they enroll at a university.
General education is closely linked to universities because there is a special tie between higher
education and general education. General education is the shared spiritual and cultural foundation
that conjoins all schools and departments of a university. Otherwise, there is no university -- just a
series of schools and departments. He clearly pointed out that there would be no universities
without general education.[5]Obviously, general education as he proposed is for all people in the
society. Due to the characteristics of specialization in different schools or departments at
universities, general education is particularly important for universities.
In 1945, Harvard Redbook -- General Education in a Free Society was published, which led the
American society to pay great attention to and discuss general education. It is worth mentioning
that the Redbook did not limit general education to universities. Instead, it looked at cultivation of
citizens' virtues in the entire western world. Therefore, a good part of the Redbook was devoted to
discussing general education in secondary school.[6]There was something in common with
Hutchins' remark that general education should be oriented towards everyone. The general
education movement in the 1940s and 1950s not only got almost all higher education institutions
involved but also raised huge interest in general education in the entire society and various
academic organizations. In 1947, the Truman administration's Higher Education Committee
released a report called Higher Education for American Democracy, which centered on the nation's
benefits in considering general education and held that the purpose of education in a democracy is
to ensure equal freedom and equal opportunity for every individual and every group. The report
said the methods of education must be changed to accommodate the diversity of student groups if
education is to play such a crucial role. It also suggested that general education give students
values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills so that they properly and comfortably live in a free
society.[7]General education in the United States was initiated by universities and became a
distinctive feature of higher education in this country. However, general education as an education
philosophy is for the entire society and every citizen. Of course, general education is also the
philosophy that guides higher education.
In Hong Kong, the government has been pushing for general education in high school in recent
years while pursuing reforms in the educational system. General education has been established as
one of the core courses in high school4. The Chinese University of Hong Kong always maintains
that general education is universities' philosophy for education, instead of something auxiliary. [8]In
Taiwan, general education has been thriving in not only research-oriented or comprehensive
universities but also universities of science and engineering, medical schools, normal schools, and
vocational schools. In recent years, some researchers and practitioners in mainland China have
also started to explore general education in adult higher education[9] and vocational education.[10]
Through the above analysis, this paper believes that general education is not a patent of
universities or a specific type of school. Instead, it is intended for everyone. Higher education has
gone too far in specialization and vocationalization, resulting in limited scopes of knowledge,
narrow visions, and biased thoughts among students. Therefore, it is of significant importance to
4
Data source: http://ls.hkedcity.net, September 12, 2006. The core subjects during the senior high school are
Chinese, English Math and General Education.
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emphasize general education at universities. Meanwhile, specialization is a notable feature of
higher education, and general education is facing challenges that arise as a result of fast
developing specialized education and vocational education. To take up such challenges,
universities in different countries or territories, of different types, and at different levels are
scrambling to engage in research and practice of general education.
What is the core in the philosophy of general education? What is its objective? The objective of
general education in the United States is frequently described in literature as "to cultivate
responsible citizens with good manner, with the focus on fostering civic quality and giving
students basic values, attitudes, knowledge etc. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the objective is more
often described as "to cultivate all-round people with broad visions". Such a description proposes
whole-person education and all-round education. The objective of general education has been
described differently in different times, countries, and territories by different universities. For
example, Newman's dream was to cultivate well-mannered gentlemen, who could think and judge
independently, qualify for any job, master all subjects, and get along with others. They had acute
abilities to appreciate as well as remarkable wisdom and talent. They were upfront, fair, and
cool-headed. They demonstrated nobleness and modesty in dealing with people and things.[11]
In Harvard Redbook, the objective of general education was to cultivate socially responsible
citizens who could think effectively with the abilities to reason logically, understand relations,
imagine things, communicate clearly, make proper judgments, and choose from different
values.[12]
In Rosovsky's opinion, the objective of general education was to cultivate well-mannered people,
who: (a) could think and write clearly and effectively; (b) had knowledge and skills in various
areas to perceive nature, society, and human beings in a critical way; (c) knew about the cultures
of other regions and times with a broad vision; (d) knew and thought about ethical issues, able to
make the right moral judgment and choice; (e) did in-depth research into knowledge of a certain
area.[13]
As proposed by Taiwan's education authority, general education is intended to cultivate "complete
people", who are not only competent workers but also intellectuals that know about life. They
need to understand the nexus of relations between different individuals, between individuals and
the social environment, between individuals and nature, etc. They live in the modern society and
know how to get along.[14]
According to Shen Junshan5 from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, a "complete person"
should be an "ideal intellectual" -- this is the profile for an intellectual by the traditional Chinese
culture. Such a person should be tolerant of different opinions, capable of objective and critical
thinking, able to make rational judgments about values, and good at expressing his or her own
thoughts. He or she had better also be able to run the country. In his or her own life, such a person
should have the elegant mood of appreciating life and the capability to seek moments of solitude
amid the bustle of life. He or she should be able to do self-regulation to strike a harmonious
balance in the fast-changing society full of competition. This is the modern version of inner
5
Shen Junshan, professor with the Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University. He was the president of
the university between 1994 and 1997. He advocated general education at the university in the 1970s. He worked
as the organizer of a panel to formulate Taiwan’s policy on general education between 1982 and 1983.
�Special issue
Insights into the Essence of General Education
cultivation and exterior action proposed by the Book of Changes.[15]
The Chinese University of Hong Kong works to cultivate well-mannered well-educated
intellectuals. They have a wide scope of knowledge and know the concepts and values of different
subjects. They are sensitive to issues that the entire human race is concerned about, they have the
right values and the capabilities to judge, and they understand the links between different subjects
and the possibility for the subjects to develop in an integrative way. In addition, they have the
potential for life-long learning.[16]
The objective of whole-person education at the University of Hong Kong is to dig deep into
students' talent and potential in order to: (a) promote their all-round development; (b) train their
language and communication skills (including Chinese, English, and information technology); (c)
foster their capabilities of life-long learning and adapting to social and working environments; (d)
allow them access to various academic fields through diversified education; (e) open their eyes to
the international stage and let them taste different cultures.[17]
Evidently, the objective of general education has been expressed in different ways in different
times and regions, which is closely related to political, economic, cultural, and historical
differences. In the United States, there are two most commonly mentioned core concepts for
general education -- "independent thinking and judgment" and "socially responsible citizens". The
former is about personal development, and the latter is about social responsibility. Involved here is
a nexus of relations between individuals and society and between freedom and democracy.
Actually, general education in the United States corresponds to the country's democratic ideal of
freedom, equality, and human rights, hoping to construct a democratic society based on individual
freedom. Iconic pragmatist Dewey thought, despite the apparent contradictions between free
individual development and a democratic society, the two are united through responsibility and
morality. Freedom for most people comes on condition that most people are socially responsible.
If most people are not socially responsible, the society will be ruled by a small number of people,
and there will be no democracy.[18]The key to responsibility is the capabilities to think and judge
independently, which make people clear about what is at stake and willing to assume
responsibility. Democracy is not only a system but also a necessary value and attitude of citizens.
It is a way of life, action, and thinking.[19]
This paper holds that the objective of general education that cultivates responsible citizens is an
expression that fits the features of the US democracy. The civic quality required for democracy not
only lies in specialized skills but also calls for general education, which provides basic knowledge
and ways of thinking in humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences for people to form values
and attitudes of a democratic society, think and judge independently and rationally, participate in
and discuss politics, and have strong civic awareness and social responsibility.
By contrast, the core concept in the objective of general education in Taiwan or Hong Kong is to
expand visions and cultivate whole or complete people. In Taiwan, universities have long been
charged with multiple political missions and economic functions, which put them in a position
where they serve to cultivate "utility people". In addition, students are divided into arts classes and
sciences classes too early in secondary school, and the college entrance exams are the sole system
that calls the final shots. Therefore, general education aims to broaden students' visions and
cultivate whole and complete people who are well-mannered and know about both work and
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life.[20] Hong Kong also gives prominence to whole-person education, which emphasizes
broadening visions, adapting to changes, understanding cultural diversity, and assuming social
responsibility.
Mainland China has a similar environment for general education as Taiwan does: (a) Universities
have long been charged with political and economic functions, with too much focus on specialized
education; (b) Under the planned economy, universities had little autonomy and lacked
subjectivity and a pursuit of university spirits; (c) Exam-oriented education is entrenched in
elementary and secondary education and is showing a trend of spreading into higher education, for
example, graduate school entrance exams. Therefore, general education should pay extra attention
to cultivating complete personality and overcoming the disadvantages brought about by excessive
specialization in higher education. Mainland China differs greatly from the United States. The
basic political principle in the United States is democracy, equality, and freedom. General
education needs to deal with the relations between the democratic society and individuals. The
idea is to achieve democracy through individual freedom and require individuals to have the
capabilities to think and judge independently. Individuals must be emancipated from ignorance,
bias, and parochialism so that they can assume civic responsibility in the democratic society.
Mainland China advocates democracy, equality, and collectivism. Therefore, general education
needs to deal with the relations between organizations and individuals. Individuals used to be
encouraged to sacrifice individual interests for collective interests, and education was based a
template, devoid of individuality and creativity. Therefore, general education needs to be
individual-based and value the all-round development of people. Education should be freed from
excessive uniformity and narrow specialization, paying more attention to the combination of
humanities and sciences so as to broaden visions and cultivate complete people who can think and
judge independently.
Based on the above analysis, this paper believes the objective of general education in mainland
China can be described as "to cultivate complete people" -- thus it is "whole-personality
education". In detail, there are two categories of requirements: individual all-round development
and social responsibility. On one hand, general education should provide basic knowledge,
capabilities, and morality as needed for human beings. One the other hand, as part of the society,
each individual should be socially responsible and inclusive of others.
Specialized studies ensure that people have the skills needed to make a living in the society.
In fact, what lies behind general education is how people understand and choose functions for
education. As a mandatory activity of the human society, education has two major functions: (a)
impacting social development and (b) impacting individual development. Which is to be put first,
individual development or social development? Different value orientations lead to different
outlooks on the objective of education. One outlook is the individual-based theory, which puts
individual values before social values and accentuates the individual need for development. In this
theory, the objective of education is determined based on individual development, and education
should promote free and all-round development of individuals. The other outlook is the
society-based theory, which holds that individual development must cater to social needs and
emphasize the political and economic functions of education. In this theory, the objective of
education is determined based on social development, and education should provide the society
�Special issue
Insights into the Essence of General Education
with people that follow certain social norms, making individuals social and keeping the stability
and continuation of the society.[21]More specifically, one theory suggests that individual
development should push social development forward, and the other suggests that social
development should drive individual development. The former is more concerned about
harmonious all-round development of individuals and proposes liberal education, general
education, and humanities education. The latter is more concerned about citizens' morality and
political quality,[22] emphasizing specialized skill education that facilitates social development. In
some sense, general education is a kind of education that puts people first, not things or tools first.
General education cultivates "complete people", instead of "utility people" that serve the society,
economy, politics, or all kinds of utilitarian purposes.
2. General Education as Education Content
A deep understanding of general education is the precondition for implementing general education.
Making clear the content of general education is a major step to take general education from an
ideal to reality. Otherwise, general education remains a vague and weak concept that is impossible
to implement. When people talk about general education, they often mean the content of general
education. Then what is the content of general education? Which basic areas of knowledge should
it cover?
The content of general education can be understood in a broad sense, an ordinary sense, and a
narrow sense, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1．The content of general education
In a broad sense, general education should include all content beyond specialized education. Just
as pointed out by Harvard Redbook, education can be roughly divided into two categories: general
education and specialized education. General education is neither education for universal
knowledge (if this kind of knowledge exists at all) nor the entire content of education. General
education normally refers to one part of education that a student receives -- the part that cultivates
the student so that he or she can become a responsible citizen.[23]Put another way, general
education in a broad sense includes formal courses (G1) and informal courses (G2), which include
club activities, social practice, lectures, campus culture etc. The purpose of G2 is to cultivate
complete personality.
The content of general education usually refers to the part of the undergraduate education program
that is intended to achieve the objective of general education (G1).Undoubtedly, this is the main
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channel and core content for higher education to reflect the philosophy of general education. In the
United States, the content of general education also mainly refers to general education courses that
are outside the specialized education that students major in.
In a narrow sense, the content of general education only refers to the courses for general education
(G12).In mainland China and Taiwan, universities set elective courses for general education when
they first start to implement general education. The courses often carry 6 to 8 credits. Therefore,
some people equal general education to the elective courses for general education.Actually, just a
small number of elective courses are inadequate for achieving the objective of cultivatingcomplete
people. Therefore, it is not desirable to understand the content of general education in this narrow
sense.
According to general education's objective of cultivating complete people, the content (courses) of
general education should cover the basics of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
That includes language, math, literature, arts, history, culture, ethical thinking, technology etc. In
teaching practice, more attention should be paid to cultivating personality, training thoughts, and
instructing students on methods. This is the basis for follow-up specialized education, the answer
to the need for adapting to social changes, and the fundamental requirement for being complete
people.[24]
3. General Education as a Model for Cultivating Talents
The model discussed here is not a uniform template or standard for general education. Instead, it
means that a system needs to be set up to ensure that the philosophy of general education is
reflected in the content and methodology of teaching, thereby guaranteeing that the objective of
general education is achieved. This way, a standardized model for cultivating talents is formulated.
In other words, the model is an institutional reflection of the philosophy and content of education.
In the case of general education, a series of supporting measures and systems must be in place
once the philosophy and content of general education are made clear. This is the only way to go if
general education is to transit from theory into a model for cultivating talents. Then, general
education can get rid of the difficulties that it is mired in, such as a low position and hard
implementation. When this is done, the objective of general education is really achieved.
The general education model is called this way as opposed to the specialized education model.
Universities always have general education and specialized education, which complement each
other to form the whole of higher education. However, as two talent cultivating models, general
education and specialized education are quite different (see Table 1)6. It can be seen that the two
talent cultivating models differ significantly in education philosophy, education content, and
education methods.
Table 1 Comparison between the general education and the specialized education models
Aspect
6
General education (United States)
Specialized education (former Soviet Union)
The general education models of the United States and the former Soviet Union were chosen, because they are
quite typical. Data source: the table on Page 66 of Theory of General Education by Yang Dongping, Liaoning
Education Publishing House, 1989.
�Special issue
Insights into the Essence of General Education
Education
Putting individual development first,
Putting social development first, collectivism and
philosophy and
individualism and democratism
nationalism
Emphasizing people's coordinated
Emphasizing people's intellectual development
development and capability training for
and knowledge transfer, cultivating utility people
complete people
who can only work
Intended to lay a foundation and prepare
Intended to train highly skilled experts
objective
for career
Education content Giving equal emphasis to humanities,
Paying extra attention to natural sciences,
and method
preferring sciences to arts
social sciences, and natural sciences,
valuing the integration between science and
engineering and the interplay between arts
and sciences
Focusing on basic education, with a wide
Focusing on specialized education, with a narrow
scope of knowledge and strong adaptability scope of knowledge and strong pragmatism
Centered on students and the society
Centered on the classroom and subjects
Valuing research, promoting studies
Mainly relying on classroom teaching
through research and practice
Cultivation system Using a credit system, which provides
Using a school-year system, which ensures strict
etc.
flexibility
and uniform teaching management
Giving prominence to comprehensive
Mainly relying on specialized colleges under the
universities, providing diversified
management of industrial ministries
management systems
In mainland China, to establish a general education model is far more difficult than to discuss the
philosophy of general education. Since the former Soviet Union set up the system for specialized
education in China, cultivating specialized talents has been reflected everywhere at universities:
education philosophy, curriculums, content and methodology of teaching, cultivation systems,
operation mechanisms, and organizational structures. On the surface, general education is about
setting some relevant courses and activities. In essence, in-depth implementation of general
education will surely involve reforms in the talent cultivating model and the university system.
III. Conclusion
The philosophy, content, and model of general education mutually affect one another, as shown in
Figure 2. If the philosophy of general education is a beautiful ideal, then the content and system of
general education are the key to materializing that ideal, which will finally become
institutionalized as a talent cultivating model.
Considering the three aspects, the relations between specialized education and general education
are as follows: As the philosophy for higher education, general education includes specialized
education. As part of higher education, general education goes hand in hand with specialized
education. They are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they must coexist to construct the whole of
�[键入文字]
undergraduate education. As talent cultivating models, general education and specialized
education are called so just to be distinguished from one another. They are not mutually opposing.
In any model, general education and specialized education both exist. Their difference lies in the
standpoint for cultivating talents. General education emphasizes putting people first and pursing
all-round development, while specialized education emphasizes meeting the society's needs and
developing skills that help make a living. Actually, if specialized education just enables students to
have a good career and lead a cozy life, without adequate responsibility for the society and the
entire human race, specialized education is incomplete. If general education fails to give a good
career and life to educated people, general education is defective.
Figure 2 Relations between the philosophy, content, and model of general education
Higher education should be an organic combination of general education content and specialized
education content under the guidance of general education's philosophy.
Considering general education from the three aspects, universities of different types at different
levels can be explained as follows: In terms of philosophy, general education applies to everyone
and every university. Becoming a complete person is everyone's lifetime goal. However, in terms
of content, universities of different types at different levels can implement general education in
different ways and to different degrees. Some elite universities can spend two years providing a
large number of general education courses and finish specialized education in postgraduate years.
At vocational schools, it is acceptable if they just provide students with a few general education
courses. The key is to ensure that students, while mastering necessary skills, learn how to think
about problems, solve problems in comprehensive and complete ways and how to behave in good
manners, instead of becoming "robots". In terms of models, different universities can have their
own unique features in general education. There is no need for uniform standards.
In the practice of general education, mixing its philosophy, content, and model or failing to figure
out the relations between these three aspects easily leads to misunderstandings about general
education. If all attention is paid to the philosophy and general education is depicted as a beautiful
ideal, the implementation of its content and the support from the system are ignored, making
general education an unreachable delusion. If general education is understood only from its
�Special issue
Insights into the Essence of General Education
content, general education is thought to be just some elective courses, common sense, or cultural
and sports activities. This is superficial and far from the essence of general education. If there is
no recognition that the implementation of general education requires a transformation of the talent
cultivating model, policy and measures are inadequate, and general education is unlikely to go
deep and last long.
This paper believes that the right understanding of the essence of general education cannot stop at
the beautiful philosophy or simplified as a few general education courses. General education
cannot be generalized as mastering all knowledge, nor can it be relegated to studies for ordinary
knowledge and practical skills. The right way to understand it is to consider three aspects:
philosophy, content, and model. Only by doing this can one really know about the rich essence of
general education, look at the relations between the ideal and reality of general education, and
deeply comprehend the straits general education is in.
With only philosophy, general education is empty. With only content, general education is
superficial. Without being a model, general education cannot be enduring.
References
[1]Guo Weifan. Method of Implementing General Education [A].Paper collection from General
Education Symposium of National Tsing Hua University [C]. 1987: 155-165.
[2]Gao Mingshi. China's Traditional Politics and Education [M]. Taipei: Wen Chin Press,
2003:148-149.
[3] (UK) C.P Snow. Two Cultures [M], translated by Chen Kejian and Qin Xiaohu. Shanghai:
Shanghai Science and Technology Press, 2003: 2-4.
[4] (US) John S Brubaker.On the Philosophy of Higher Education [M], translated by Zheng Jiwei
et al. Hangzhou, Zhejiang Education Publishing House, 1987:80-82.
[5] (US) Robert M Hutchins.The Higher Learning in America [M].translated by Wang Libing.
Hangzhou: Zhejiang Education Publishing House, 2001 :5-51.
[6][12] [23] Harvard Committee.(1945).General Education in aFree Society.Harvard University
Press, 103-176, 65-72, 51-52.
[7]Wang Yingjie. Reforms and Development of Higher Education in the United States [M].
Beijing: People's Education Press, 1993:219-221.
[8]Zhang Canhui. Preface [A]. Overview of General Education in Hong Kong [R].Department of
General Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.
[9]Dong Junmin. Research into General Education in Adult Higher Education [D]. Wuhan:
Central China Normal University, 1999.
[10]Liu Xiubo. Intensifying General Education at Vocational Colleges [D]. Shenyang: Northeast
Normal University, 2006.
[11] (UK) Newman.The Ideal of a University [M].translated by XuHui. Hangzhou: Zhejiang
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Education Publishing House, 2001:4.
[13] (US) Henry Rosovsky. American Campus Culture [M]. translated by Xie Zongxian. Jinan:
Shandong People's Publishing House, 1996: 90-92.
[14] Gao Mingshi. China's Traditional Politics and Education [M]. Taipei: Wen Chin Press,
2003:154.
[15] Shen Junshan. Foreword [A]. General Education Quarterly. 1994 (first issue).
[16] Department of General Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.Overview of
General Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [R]. 2005.
[17] Overview of General Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [EB/0L].
http://www. hku. edu,2006-09-18.
[18] (US) Dewey.Dewey's Lectures in China [M].translated by Hu Shi. Hefei: Anhui Education
Publishing House, 1999: 167-178.
[19] Wang Shouchang. Philosophy in the Western Society [M].The Eastern Publishing Co., Ltd.
[20]Huang Junjie. Theory and Practice of General Education at Universities [M].Taipei: Taiwan
General Education Society, 2005:7-12.
[21]Wang Cesan. Modern Education Theory [M]. Beijing: People's Education Press,
1996:222-223.
[22] Jin Yiming. Research into China's Policy for Quality-Oriented Education [M].Jinan:
Shandong Education Publishing House, 2004:100-104.
[24] Pang Haishao. General Education: Difficulty and Hope [M]. Beijing: Beijing Institute of
Technology Press, 2009:41-45.
Pang Haishao
Telephone:0086-13520341310
Email: panghaishao@163.com
�
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Text
Value and Virtue in America
by Frank Pagano
We were all ranked together at valuation. Men and women, old and young,
married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses
and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the
scale of being, and all were subjected to the same narrow examination.
Frederick Douglass 1
Part one: the crisis of capitalism
Economics, as the most precise of the social sciences, has served American liberal
democracy well. Without reference to moral judgment or moral shame, it has quantified the
democratic aims of prosperity and equality, and informed the political powers which policies to
pursue to achieve these ends. Economics seems to be an honest broker and the one study
necessary for the people and rulers of a liberal democracy. Its trustworthiness stems from its
development and reliance upon the notion of “value”. Jerry Z. Muller in “Capitalism and
Inequality” 2 exemplifies this honesty. He is an economist and historian who, although a
proponent of capitalism, nevertheless reveals its inability to address the crisis of the moment.
This crisis he describes as the rising economic inequality in American society, and this paper
shall characterize it as the devaluation of value. This characterization is not a mere paradox
because the term is used equivocally even by economists. I argue that sometimes it means the
exchange value of the commodities bought and sold in the marketplace, 3 and other times it refers
to the good that draws the buyer into the market, what Karl Marx calls the use-value of a thing.
1
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. New Haven, 2001. 38.
Muller, Jerry. “Capitalism and Inequality” in Foreign Affairs. March/April 2013. 30-51.
3
Cf. Kerr, William. “Theories of Economic Value.” A lecture. Summer 2013.
2
1
�To speak of the pursuit of value as though it were the highest good of America is to
propagate obscurity. 4 Value was developed to avoid the question of the highest good of a people
or individual. It transforms goods into marketplace commodities with values. This is exactly the
advantage of economics: it makes determinations of value without reference to the rank of
goods. Economics is a social science that is most accurate for capitalist nations willing to allow
value to stand in the place of a hierarchy of goods. Economic solutions work well in confident
modern societies. Muller argues that the growth of economic inequality threatens American
confidence in the capitalist system (30). This paper argues that what is happening currently is a
broad discrediting of the use by the capitalist system of value for ranking people and their work.
Inherent to the capitalist system, Muller observes, is the “creative destruction” that alters
the activities that are most valued with the familiar result that in a capitalist economy certain
jobs, indeed whole professions, become obsolete (36). In the earlier crises of capitalism people
were able to make both economic and social adjustments to the destruction. For example, in the
greatest previous capitalist crisis, industrialization, when the population moved from the farm to
the factory, at first women and children were used in the factories, but in the end the greater
physical strength of the men proved to be more valuable to the factory owners (34). Women
adjusted socially and became homemakers to the advantage, Muller notes, of the health and
welfare of the entire family. The children especially profited from the breadwinner-homemaker
household.
4
th
The accusation against America starting early in the 19 century was that it was in effect nihilistic. For example in
The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal has the Duchess Sanseverina explain to the protagonist, her nephew,
Fabrizio who considers fleeing to America rather than to become a priest: “’Believe me, for you as for me, an
American life would be a sad business.’ She explained to him the cult of the god dollar, and the respect that must
be paid to merchants and artisans in the street, who by their votes determine everything. They returned to the
question of the Church.” Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma. Trans. Richard Howard. New York. 1999. 117
2
�Yet social adjustment to the current crisis of capitalism, Muller maintains, is highly
unlikely. The post-industrial economy no longer values physical strength and the capacity to
labor but instead it values first “cognitive ability: quickness of mind, the ability to infer and
apply patterns drawn from experience and the ability to deal with mental complexity…[second]
character and social skills: self-discipline, persistence, responsibility…and …third…actual
knowledge” (40). The new valuable skills are so little like the old skills of labor that the new
skills have been placed on the capital side of the labor-capital division. These abilities do not
operate like human labor but like capital. They are “human capital.” Muller therefore sketches
not merely a change in the economy but in the virtue that makes humans worthwhile. The worker
and his labor are no longer valuable but the thinker and his knowledge are. It is no longer labor
that spontaneously produces value but self-investment or family investment in the mind of the
person “working” in the economy. Value is not correlated to the effort of the individual but to the
social investment in her for which she is probably not responsible.
Therefore the traditional means, equality of opportunity, that reconciled the twin roots of
liberal democracy, freedom and equality, has failed in the current economy. Equality of
opportunity is now socially an empty term. It is not sufficient to provide equality of opportunity
because the unequal social investment in children means that there is no equality in the capacity
of the young to take advantage of the opportunities offered (45). Although equality of
opportunity always meant that some people would do better than others and therefore it always
resulted in inequality, it did allow some just proportion between the free pursuit of opportunity
and the resulting improvement in the social condition of the worker and his family. If there was
no equality of result, at least there was progress toward a better life. Because the family is the
“workshop in which human capital is produced” (33), the incentives of the economy cannot now
3
�advance those who are born in disadvantaged families. There is no economic policy that can
redress the current growing inequality.
The odd fact is that a significant portion of the American population is rejecting the
formation of human capital in their children. Rather than emulate those people who have
successfully invested in their children, they are choosing behavior that, studies show, obstructs
the development of human capital. They are rejecting stable two parent families for single parent
families as though building human capital appears to them as irrational. They do not accept that
what is humanly rational, the pursuit of happiness, is equivalent to what is economically rational,
the pursuit of value. Muller acknowledges that “communal groupings” as well as the family
largely determine the economic success of its members. He refers to The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, a study by the sociologist Max Weber that makes the case for why
“Protestants tended to do better economically than Catholics, and Calvinists better than
Lutherans” (45). Muller asserts that “the explanations offered for such patterns are less important
than the fact differential group performance has been a perennial feature in the history of
capitalism” (46). This may be true from the perspective of economic analysis. It is not true if
there is a social trend away from accepting value, which usually reduces a good to a marketplace
relationship, as the sign of a rational life. In fact the dismissal of the investigation into the moral
roots of American problems indicates that value has been transformed from a sign into a selfsufficient standard for human life. America is beset by two opposite trends, one that dismisses
value as an indicator of a rational life and the other that identifies rational good with value itself.
It is a common myth that capitalism developed from a people that identified value and good as
the same attribute. Propagation of this myth is part of the devaluation of value as a legitimate
sign of a rational life. In fact the accumulation of capital is not always a rational pursuit.
4
�Consequently it is of the utmost importance to know how economic value was originally
understood so that it became a widespread sign for a rational life. This renewed understanding
will help return capitalism to its original grounding in freedom.
There are two traditional and alternative justifications for regarding value as a reflection
of the rational good. The first is philosophical and linked directly to justice. It is formulated as
the labor theory of value, first set out, I believe, by John Locke. He explicitly links labor to
property rights.
27. Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every
man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself.
The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided and left it in,
he has mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and
thereby makes it his properly. It being by him removed from the common state
nature has placed it in, it has by this labor something annexed to it that excludes
the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property
of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at
least where there is enough and as good left in common for others. 5
Later in the argument Locke connects labor to value: “It is labor, then, which puts the greatest
part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything; it is to that we owe
the greatest part of all its useful products” (43:26). But this is not Locke’s final word on the
source of value. Money revolutionizes the notion of value. Indeed money rather than labor
becomes the chief source of value in the social world humans inhabit.
For, I ask, what would a man value ten thousand or a hundred thousand acres of
excellent land, ready cultivated and well stocked, too, with cattle, in the middle of
inland parts of America where he had no hopes of commerce with other parts of
the world to draw money to him by the sale of the product? It would not be worth
the enclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild common of nature
whatever was more than would supply the conveniences of life to be had there for
him and his family (48:29).
5
Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis, 1952. 27:17.
5
�The value associated with money is not directly connected to labor or to natural right. Indeed
there are not as many good things left to others, as required by right in nature, after the effects of
money are felt, but rather each individual attempts to accumulate more than he can use for
himself. Regardless of what others have, money can create an artificial scarcity that allows the
notion of value to devalue labor, and, since labor value is connected to right, the devaluation of
labor devalues right and justice. From the perspective of labor, money is an artifice of the mind
that might break the connection between value and labor, between value and right and justice.
For the laborer allowing capital to establish the value of things is only justified if it provides
plenty. And even plenty is not good enough. Capitalism must make labor more valuable than it is
in nature if it is to retain its connection to right. Thus labor rightly relinquishes its direct link to
value (serving as the original source of value) only if as a result labor becomes more valuable.
Property consequent upon labor is naturally right; property consequent upon the manipulation of
money is artificially right. This economic artifice is only truly right if it affirms labor as the
natural and true source of all value.
The second justification of value, which is sometimes in tension with the first, appears in
the work to which Muller refers when he claims that differential group achievement in capitalism
is longstanding—Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. It provides
a theological justification linked to enlightenment. Weber argues that the Protestant notion of a
“calling,” heightened in Calvinism by the doctrine of election by grace, 6 generated the conditions
for capitalism. The loneliness of election demanded some support for the conviction that the
individual belongs to the elect. Weber explains:
Totally unsuited though good works are to serve as a means of attaining
salvation…they are indispensable as signs of election. In this sense they are
occasionally described as “indispensable for salvation”…This means, however,
6
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit of Capitalism. New York, 2002. 28-36.
6
�fundamentally, that God helps those who help themselves, in other words, the
Calvinist creates his salvation himself…more correctly: creates the certainty of
salvation. It further means that what he creates cannot consist, as in Catholicism,
in a gradual storing up of meritorious individual achievements; instead, it consists
in a form of systematic self-examination which is constantly faced with the
question: elect or reprobate? (79)
Systematic self-examination demands a rational system of signs that indicate that an individual
has been chosen to be among the elect. For the greater glory of God, the work of the faithful
should result in a rational system of signs. This is not synonymous with a rational secular world,
although it might increase God’s glory if the work of the faithful results in a greater rationality of
the world. Moreover it is significant that wealth is not good in itself but good only as a sign. It is
an intellectual good in some sense more than it is a material good. In the Protestant view, value is
a means to a kind of self-knowledge.
It is clear that the seeking of signs to be assured of election is compatible with regarding
value as a conventional token of the highest good. The market gives signs of what is valuable
more or less, and the individual is free to follow the market or to ignore it. For these Protestants
wealth is not good in itself but good only insofar as it can be used as evidence for the rationality
of one’s own work and used in one’s work to rationalize the world. The chief point of this
discussion is that the religious virtues of piety and faith are compatible with the accumulation of
capital. In the Protestant doctrines work and the accumulation of capital serve rational reflection.
Capital is regarded by the Protestants as much the result of a kind of thinking as a kind of labor.
The accumulation of capital is not a consequence of good works but of systematic good works.
The faithful are already convinced of God’s providence. The systematic work of the faithful is an
attempt to be certain that God has extended his highest providence, salvation, to a particular
member of the congregation. Capital is for these Protestants a means to reflect on God’s
providence in relation to the individual. Work is subordinate to reflection upon God’s
7
�providence. Work is not related to justice. Value is not a token for a just distribution according to
desert. The rise of inequality is therefore not an objection to the rationality of the Calvinist
economy.
Weber begins his examination of the Protestant ethic with a “sermon” by Benjamin
Franklin 7. Franklin’s thought secularizes Protestantism. The virtues connected to Calvinism and
those required for the enlightenment Franklin proposes, however, are similar. Both have
confidence in a rational providence and advocate a kind of asceticism, study and work. The
emphasis in both Calvin and Franklin is on self-worth. For Calvinism this worth resides in
election, and for the faith in human enlightenment, it arises from a conviction in the moral
agency of the individual. Francis Bacon, one of the originators of the enlightenment, names the
virtue of “self-reverence 8” as the source of all virtue. Insofar as value stands as a sign for
enlightenment as the rational human good, it is connected to self-reverence, which is in turn
based on the conviction that enlightened people may be free. It requires a faith in the human
capacity to learn how to make rational judgments and to act on these judgments. For the free
individual, rationality is compelling because it increases her self-worth. Capitalism in this view
is radically dependent upon the incomparable worth of free individuals.
Taken in its broadest terms then, the same system of capitalism might seem rational or
irrational depending upon which virtue connected to which good that value is a token for. From
the perspective of justice, the value of the industrial economy of post-world war two America
was a proper standard for a just society. Labor was rewarded. Physical effort was connected to
the value of things and by extension accumulating value was proportionate to the worth of the
individual engaged in labor. Time spent laboring was time well spent. By contrast if justice must
7
Weber begins his consideration of Protestantism and capitalism by examining Franklin’s advice for living. Weber
wants to understand how the justification for capitalism evolved from Calvin to Franklin. (11-14)
8
Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis. Oxford, 1974. 236.
8
�be connected to a rational economy, the present system and therefore the present manifestation
of value are irrational. Consider the enormous effort that a family must make to accumulate
human capital in their children. Twenty years of laboring by parents and child to result in a
person with enough capital to participate in the current economy. And for disadvantaged
families, the result of these labors is probably inadequate. Labor and justice are demeaned. This
prolonged asceticism is at odds with the schema of rewards apparent at the peak of capitalism in
the world of high finance. Muller observes: “The structure of incentives in this environment led
fund managers to try to maximize short-term returns, and this pressure trickled down to
corporate executives. The shrunken time horizon created a temptation to boost immediate profits
at the expense of longer-term investments, whether in research and development or in improving
the skills of the company’s work force” (43). There is no just proportion between labor and
reward. The manipulators of capital enjoy quick and gigantic rewards; many of the investors in
humans distant and little rewards.
From another perspective, however, contemporary capitalism has entered into an era of
increased rationalism. If we adopt the view of secularized Protestantism, the view of Benjamin
Franklin, for example, then the contemporary arrangement values the development of the mind
over immediate material gratifications. Value in this case is a sign of the cultivation of the mind. 9
It is not the good in itself. Like the early Protestants, successful capitalists spend their youth
developing their capacity to think and evaluate the world. The disproportionality of time spent
investing in human capital as opposed to the investment of moneyed capital is a further sign that
systematic human development is worth more than financial rewards. The time is
disproportionate because the investment in humans requires a faith in human development akin
to the old faith in God’s providence. Christians are patient because their standard for time is
9
Muller acknowledges the part that capitalism has played in human self-cultivation (32).
9
�eternity; the middle class is patient because their standard for time is a lifetime. The new middle
class are not seeking justice but a confirmation of their enlightenment.
Value is merely a sign of what the society holds as worthwhile. It is accurate to
characterize the contemporary situation as the devaluing of value because it is clear that
significant portions of American society no longer believe that value is a reliable sign of
individual worth. For those who have dropped out of the economy, the disadvantaged, value is
not an indicator of personal worth but a sign of the injustice of the current economy. These
people, Muller worries, may generate a “populist backlash against the capitalist system at large”
(30). By the natural standard of labor value the system is unjust, and some remedy needs to be
found. Muller suggests continuing the mixed economy with a capitalist job market and a social
safety net for those disadvantaged by that market. Justice must be found elsewhere than in the
economic marketplace.
Yet capitalism is in a deeper crisis since a significant portion of the American population,
including those who have successfully navigated the system, taking their cues from the managers
of money and big business, believes value to be the rational human good. Oswald Spengler
argues that at the end of western civilization money dominates because it is a value that appears
in disguise as a fact 10. But a greater crisis of capitalism is coming since value, which is a sign
that stands in for the rational good, is believed to be the rational good itself. Human worth then is
merely a financial calculation. Economic valuation determines that the disadvantaged are
worthless, and the rest of the population are servants to the caprice of value ungrounded in
human worth. They are unthinking economic actors benighted by fashion and convention.
Capitalism in such an event is merely nihilism that appears in disguise as a rational and
10
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York, 1928. 2:492.
10
�systematic organization of the human world. The destruction of human worth as a real
phenomenon will end all possibility of creative human effort.
Part two: what is to be done?
The best solution to the crisis in capitalism is one that brings together the two traditional
supports of capitalism: the free pursuit of enlightenment and justice. Muller, as noted above,
argues that American public policy must pursue these goals independently: the capitalist market
for those in pursuit of self-cultivation (enlightenment) and a government safety net to insure
justice. Yet this paper has pointed to the fact that his double approach does not address the root
of the problem: the discrediting of value. Capitalism demands that humans exercise their
capacity to be moral agents and to develop their worth freely. The obvious single way to restore
confidence in capitalism is to reconnect it to justice together with enlightenment. For the
disadvantaged, this restoration could be achieved directly if skilled labor again were connected to
value. It seems that this restoration requires the reindustrialization of America, or at least the
active training of the disadvantaged in the skilled labor that is unlikely to vanish. This would
seem to be an economic goal the social sciences are well equipped to advance.
Yet even if America is able to return to the supports that natural rights and the labor
theory of value first supplied capitalism, in an era of the devaluation of value, it must strengthen
the support that enlightenment supplies capitalism. A renewed enlightenment is a more radical
demand because it conflicts with the conventional wisdom of the relation of economics to the
public good. The new enlightenment requires a critique of capitalism as conventionally
practiced. Economic analysis cannot be accepted as trustworthy without an understanding of how
economic “prudence” affects the freedoms of the citizenry. American history shows that some
Americans knew very well how to produce free humans in the face of the devaluation of value.
11
�For instance there is no greater argument for the sometime viciousness of value than the lines
from Frederick Douglass that are at the top of this paper. Value serves the conventions of the
society. When the conventions are bad or empty of freedom, value is as well. It might stand in
for the rawest injustice as it did in the antebellum south or a crude nihilism as it now threatens to
do. Douglass outlines three steps to self-reverence in the face of a valuation serving injustice. He
first learned to read and then he used that freedom to read in order to read speeches about
freedom and finally he acted upon that knowledge of freedom. 11 Few people have the
intelligence and courage of a Frederick Douglass so that he hardly seems to serve as a guide for a
general revival of personal worth. Still Frederick Douglass had an advantage over Americans
whose prejudices accord with the social conventions that value stands in for. Douglass knew that
value in his time served injustice. Americans now lack his moral clarity. Against the common
usage, much of this paper has argued that value is no longer connected to justice. In the post
industrial economy it is indifferent to justice and to the importance of moral agency altogether.
Douglass also knew that freedom required education. His owner admitted that the most
potent means of keeping people in slavery is denying them any education (31-32). In the case of
Douglass, rebellion against the unjust society and the pursuit of education were one and the
same. Even elementary education was liberal education because it opened up to him a world in
which he could live freely, the world of letters. His first assertion of freedom was learning to
read. The case of the slaveholder was quite different. He was oppressor and oppressed at once.
His conventional education served his prejudices and made him vicious. 12 One of the main
arguments of the Narrative is that slavery kept the slaveholder ignorant and made him bad. His
11
Douglass rebelled against his owners by learning to read against their hopes. He used this power to read
speeches on Irish calls to freedom, and finally he resisted a beating from a slaveholder to whom Douglass was sent
to be broken.
12
See the use that one of Douglass’ owners put Christianity (42-45)
12
�apparent virtues were vices. Accordingly the Narrative is a work written primarily for the benefit
of the slaveholder. He had the opportunity to educate himself liberally, in the first place by
reading Douglass’ narrative; the slave lacked this opportunity.
Contemporary America seems very far from the situation of antebellum America. If
education was then the vehicle of freedom and justice, it now seems to be the means for
maintaining economic inequality. Indeed Muller insists that education is not “a panacea” (47).
Since achievement gaps “have their origins in the different levels of human capital children
possess when they enter school,” the problem seems to require “resocializing” whole
neighborhoods, and widespread resocializing is unrealistic and too costly. In contrast this paper
has developed the argument that the problem of capitalism requires reeducating the nation. The
disadvantaged are taking their understanding of capitalism from the apparent irrationality of the
relation between the struggle to create human worthiness (called economically “human capital”)
and the reward for that struggle if the true reward (liberty) is described in terms of value. It is a
mistake to judge in terms of value the liberation that real education offers the individual. It is a
mistake that almost every American makes. Americans think as though they are economists even
when their actions do not involve economic rationality. But it is the virtues linked to freedom
that give people their worth. When capitalism acknowledged this truth, it liberated people. When
it ignored this truth, it ceased being true capitalism. Yet if ignorance makes people oppressor and
oppressed at once, liberal education makes them liberator and liberated at once. All true
education is a kind of rebellion, a rebellion against prejudice. Americans need to rebel from the
tyranny of value. Value is not always equivalent to justice and it is not necessarily equivalent to
enlightenment. It is usually equivalent to conventional “wisdom.”
13
�Value is an honest servant only when understood as a sign of the conventional order. In a
liberal democracy based on justice and human enlightenment, the conventional order may be
approached through value without further elaboration, but when the terms of value change, then
the conventional order demands moral analysis, that is, analysis in terms of a community of free
agents. The new economic terms, like “human capital,” need restatement in the terms of
freedom. If “human capital” stands in for the effects of enlightenment on the economy, then that
moral analysis must stand alongside the economic characterization so that the citizenry might
know what effect the new term indicates morally. Likewise, as this paper has shown, “creative
destruction” is not merely the replacement of one means of production for another. It also
implies the replacement of one human virtue for another, or it may mean the replacement of a
virtue by a vice. Indeed creative destruction might stand in for the general enslavement and
debasement of the population, the end wrought by the “creative destruction” following the
invention of the cotton gin.
Capitalism in the current era needs the support of liberal education. Capitalism is
dynamic, and therefore the threats to Americans as free agents are in flux. Since value reflects
thoughtless human choices, thoughtless with respect to their effects on freedom, the need for
liberal education is constant and unrelenting. It is their prejudices that people value, and they
need to confront them rather than to disguise them as value. How will this liberal education help
the disadvantaged who, according to economic analysis, are not able to take advantage of it?
When the terms of the problem are changed, the terms of the solution may also change. The
problem is a matter of self-worth in an economic order that does not supply the means to gaining
this self–worth. Does the social safety net address this problem? Does American society present
the problem to the disadvantaged in its true terms so that they can help address it themselves?
14
�Merely providing a safety net does not acknowledge that the disadvantaged have the capacity for
moral agency. The pressing problem is how to devise a public policy, and to articulate the
justification of this policy, that supposes that Americans have the capacity and desire for
freedom. Obviously policy makers and teachers should have a liberal education so that they can
see the social problem for what it is. In the end citizenship, so long as the people is sovereign,
requires liberal education so that the citizens can interpret economic prescriptions for what they
are.
Capitalism needs liberal education because the spirit of capitalism is a consequence of the
enlightenment of the free human. Capitalism can only be free activity if there are free
enlightened individuals. The free individual knows that he should not be a slave to prejudice and
that she should learn the arguments of her opponents. Many contemporary American prejudices
are phrased in economic terms that give to prejudice the disguise of science. To listen only to
what one already believes is the surest way to be a slave to prejudice. Enlightened humans study
the human world, those parts that are familiar and those that are strange, those that are current
and those that are bygone. They study both value and virtue and their relationship to each other
and listen to arguments that maintain and those that deny that value is liberating. They seek the
origins of America’s freedom in order to renew it.
This call to liberal education may seem to be misplaced 17th century Protestantism. Yet
the virtues that created capitalism did not arise out of capitalism. They created capitalism only as
a social sign of enlightenment and justice. Enlightened capitalism is a sign of the moral agency
of human freedom. Weber notes that Benjamin Franklin gave his capitalist sermon to people in
America whose economy was at most only half capitalist. Yet this sermon helped to produce the
most advanced capitalist nation. Economic progress in a capitalist nation rests upon the enduring
15
�freedom of individuals. For this freedom to persist the individuals of a nation must be
enlightened. It is a sign of the depth of the current crisis in capitalism that much of the discussion
of liberal education is that it is not now truly valuable. It is upside down thinking to judge liberal
education in terms of its economic value. In fact liberal education produced economic value.
Economic value should be judged in terms of moral freedom. By its own terms capitalism is
endangered. Ignorant capitalism threatens the freedom implicit in capitalism; liberal education
can lift the ignorance and preserve the freedom. Still no one knows how long the school of
freedom will remain open. No one knows how long capitalism will survive.
16
�
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The Challenges to Liberal Education and St. John’s College
in the Twenty-First Century
Christopher B. Nelson
Santa Fe Conference: What Is Liberal Education For?
October 19, 2014
The modern world is certainly doing everything it can to make liberal education difficult to
obtain. I suppose that it was always so. The pressures of the moment invariably seem so pressing
that it is hard to remember the Biblical injunction “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
And even harder to keep one’s eye on the goal of training one’s mind, heart, and soul for the
attainment of happiness, which is the ultimate end of liberal education, as the pursuit of happiness
is our political birthright.
I wish to examine a few of the rather practical demands upon higher education today and to close
with an overarching challenge to liberal education, in the hope that I may turn a largely
pessimistic task into an opportunity for all who care about liberal education.
One of the most insistent of these demands is the nearly universal call for reduction in the cost of
education. To most people, this means a reduction in the price being paid by students and their
families. While we would all like to pay less for the things we want and need, this demand fails to
recognize that colleges have done a remarkable job of containing costs. In the first place, at our
not-for-profit colleges no one actually pays for the full cost of their education, even if they pay
the full list price, because the costs are subsidized by government support, endowment income,
and gifts from friends, alumni, corporations, and foundations. Second, the inflation-adjusted price
of attending college at most independent colleges has, on average, actually remained stable or
dropped over the last decade due to generous financial aid programs. This has occurred despite
the recent uncertainty of our investment returns, fundraising challenges, and sharp increases in
financial aid as a result of the Great Recession. Third, many colleges have cut or frozen staffing
and compensation as well in order to reduce costs.
So colleges have, in fact, responded aggressively to the demand to reduce costs, although this fact
seems not to be well appreciated by the press, by our political leadership, or by the families of
college-bound students, who in increasing numbers are allowing price, more than quality of
educational offerings, to shape their choice of college.
Another demand that threatens higher education is the demand for ever more assessment of
student learning and assessment of the colleges that provide learning opportunities. In higher
education circles, there is something of a feeding frenzy surrounding the issue of assessment. The
federal government wants assessments that will allow it to compare colleges and universities that
provide “value”; accrediting organizations want assessments of student learning outcomes; state
agencies want assessments to prove that tax dollars are being spent efficiently; institutions want
internal assessments that they can use to demonstrate success to their own communities.
�The main purpose of all this assessment is to determine whether an institution effectively delivers
knowledge to its students, as though teaching and learning were a transaction, like a commodity
exchange. This view of education very much downplays the role of students in their own
education. I share the view of Mr. David Levine, in his remarks at this same conference, that no
matter how good one’s professor, no matter how great the learning material, no one else can learn
for you. Learning belongs to the student! If there is anything that is effective at St. John’s
College, it is learning. This is because the learner is at the center of learning at the College.
Current assessment models, it seems to me, habitually—and almost obsessionally—understate the
responsibility of the student for his or her own learning, and, what is more consequential,
overstate the responsibility of the teacher. Teachers are directed to provide clear written
statements of observable learning outcomes; to design courses in which students have the
opportunity to achieve those outcomes; to assess whether students achieve those outcomes; and to
use the assessments of students to improve the courses so that attainment of the prescribed
outcomes is enhanced. The standards do not entirely remove the student as an agent—the course
provides the “opportunity,” while the student must “achieve” the outcomes. But the assessment
procedures prescribe in advance the outcome for the student; the student can achieve nothing of
significance, as far as assessment goes, except what the professor preordains.
This is a mechanical and illiberal exercise. If the student fails to attain the end, is it because the
professor has not provided a sufficient opportunity? Or because the student, in his or her freedom,
hasn’t acted? Or, heaven forbid, because the student has upon reflection rejected the outcome
desired by the teacher in favor of another! The assessment procedure accurately measures the
effectiveness of the curriculum precisely to the extent that the student’s personal freedom is
discounted.
True learning is not about having the right answer. So measuring whether students have the right
answers is at best incidental to the essential aims of education. True learning is about mastering
the art of asking questions and seeking answers, and applying that mastery to your own life.
Ultimately, it is about developing the power of self-transformation - or self-formation, as so many
of the young are still developing a self to be transformed. This shaping of the self is the single
most valuable ability one can have for meeting the demands of the ever-changing world in which
we live. Meaningful assessment has to find a way of measuring attainment in these areas rather
than those best adapted to the economic metaphor.
The way to judge whether students have attained the sort of freedom that can be acquired by
study is simply to demand that they undertake and successfully complete an intellectual
investigation on their own. We do this in virtually every piece of writing required of our students
in every class at St. John’s College. And we do it in our classroom conversations and laboratories
as well. The regular practice of undertaking these independent investigations, we hope, will
become a habit that our alumni will use as a matter of course throughout their lives. This
independence will empower them to meet the challenges of life and work, and it will help them
shape lives worth living, arrived at through thoughtful exploration of the question of just what
kind of life they want to make for themselves.
On the whole, higher education would do well to repurpose most of the money being spent on
assessment. Use it instead to do away with large lecture classes (the very embodiment of
information transfer, or education-as-commodity) so that students can have serious discussions
with teachers, and teachers can practice the kind of continuous assessment that really matters in
helping students to meet the responsibilities of their own learning. But when there are lectures, let
�them be stimuli for serious conversation, so that the students can appropriate for themselves what
belongs to themselves, not the lecturer, as they thoughtfully sift through what they have heard.
A related demand that threatens liberal education is the demand for a national college ratings
program. The current government plan for improving higher education depends greatly on
developing a ratings system to determine which colleges offer “best value.” “Value” will have
price and cost as factors in determining the ratings. This sort of ratings system will certainly
produce unintended and detrimental consequences for liberal education.
To the extent that the value of an education is measured in monetary terms—by such factors as
cost, price, future earnings, and loan indebtedness—it fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature
of higher education. The highest learning—the kind that helps you to become the owner of your
life—is not a commodity any more than your life is a commodity. To measure the value of an
education largely in terms of its price of entry or its economic return is to be complicit in the
ongoing cheapening of education.
To the extent that value is not measured in economic terms, it will be extremely difficult to find a
common standard for determining the value of an education, since students weigh many different
factors in choosing a college suited to their individual needs. Ratings of any kind suggest that all
students are, or ought to be, looking for the same kind of thing from a college education; it also
assumes that colleges are more alike than they actually are. Better instead to find ways of getting
as much information as possible about each school to each student and let them make their own
ratings—ones that will suit their own individual needs!
Only freely educated citizens freely pursuing their own paths to a life worth living can shape a
society that will protect the lives and promote the happiness of us all. This statement ought to be
the basis of all public policy in this area. I think it explains the success of the Pell Grant Program,
which has resulted in a leveraging of federal dollars to give students from all walks of life a real
opportunity to exercise their choices freely within the broad range of accredited schools.
After discussing these demands, all relating in some way to the commodification of higher
education, let me now mention a challenge—probably the most pressing challenge that we
liberal arts colleges face: persuading our institutions, the press, and the public that society
desperately needs our kind of education. Here I can say a few encouraging words about how we
might, together, begin to turn the tide of opposition to liberal education.
The world seems to be approaching an inflection point in its previously insatiable demand for
more and more specialized knowledge. Today it is clamoring not only for intelligence and
specific expertise, but also for ingenuity and the ability to connect disparate areas of experience.
Those who do not recognize the liberal arts as the province of ingenuity and interconnection seem
to believe that these demands can be met by following the very course that led to uninventiveness
and fragmentation in the first place—namely, by pursuing more specialization. “If we just do
enough research,” they seem to think, “perhaps we could come up with a checklist, or a training
program, or a college curriculum that would deliver the ingenuity and integrated thinking we
want.”
This blind spot for anything that does not fit the research paradigm, which has been growing for
something like two hundred years now, prevents the world from seeing that the solution already
exists, and has existed for millennia. The human faculty that makes ingenuity and interconnection
possible is imagination. And developing imagination in all its forms is the proper excellence of
�the liberal arts. Through repeated encounters with the greatest writings and artworks of the past—
in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, history, ethics, politics, music, painting, sculpture,
dance, and so on—we become accustomed to the habits of imagination that enabled our most
talented predecessors to conceive boldly, to invent what did not yet exist, to recreate both
themselves and the world around them.
To reinvent the world in the face of modern challenges, we need to reinvigorate imagination
through liberal education. But the world cannot see this, because liberal education is situated
precisely in its blind spot. And most of the current arguments in defense of liberal education
ignore this blind spot. We try to persuade those who see no practical benefits in liberal education
that it has higher aims—broad learning, development of character, and preparation for
citizenship. But these aims are incompatible with the research paradigm, and fall squarely in the
world’s blind spot. For the intended audience, this rhetoric makes insubstantial noises that seem
to come from no one, from nowhere.
We must stop defending liberal education in this way. Indeed, as Hunter Rawlings has recently
suggested (http://hechingerreport.org/content/offense-liberal-arts_17299), we should stop
defending liberal education altogether. The rhetorical task that faces us is not to make the world
see something it cannot see, but to point to something in its blind spot so clearly that its existence
cannot be denied, even if it is invisible.
Fortunately, liberal artists are good at rhetoric. We know how to hook an audience through its
desires and then persuade it to follow. The world wants ingenuity and interconnectedness? Then
that is the place to start. Let us create beautiful and aspirational arguments leading from ingenuity
and interconnectedness back to imagination and its guardian, liberal education. Let us abandon
the defensive posture altogether, and replace it with the confident bearing of a physician who
knows the cure. Let us recreate the rhetorical landscape around the world’s current desires. Let us
devise a new repertory of innovative and attractive tropes that will succeed where the old
defensive tropes have failed. Let us invent the positive rhetoric that will help to shrink the world’s
blind spot, so that it can begin to see liberal education, rather than specialized education, as the
answer to its needs.
I have no doubt that we liberal artists can do this. We are the offspring of godlike poets, the heirs
to the most persuasive rhetors who ever lived. If we can summon a smattering of their
inventiveness, tell our story with a fraction of their ardor, and forge fresh language suited to the
dignity of our object, we can wean the world from its addiction to specialization, at the very least
in our high schools and early years of college.
But we must do it in concert. The attack on liberal education will not likely be turned back by
individual efforts, no matter how ingenious. On the contrary, we must devise and deploy our
alternate rhetorical idiom as a coordinated force. We must use that idiom almost to the exclusion
of the other, refusing to speak in its terms. With persistence, if our vision is attractive enough, we
will crowd out and eventually replace the world’s idiom.
What will this rhetoric sound like? It will eschew the economic metaphors that distort the essence
of learning and teaching—rejecting terms like “value,” “investment,” “payoff,” “consumer,”
“provider,”—and it will invariably and vigorously question the use of such terms, so that the
users may begin to suspect they have a blind spot. It will defer the old tropes about breadth,
character, and citizenship, at least until we are certain that the blind spot has diminished enough
for our listeners to see where those arguments are coming from. And, finally, its central collection
of tropes will focus on imagination—imagination as the source of ingenuity and
�interconnectedness, imagination as the leader to be followed by specialization, imagination as the
priceless treasure protected and transmitted by the liberal arts.
Let me close by saying that we proponents of liberal education are, and have been for a long
time, implicated in bringing about the very threats that face us.
We do not understand our situation well if we portray it to ourselves as enlightened champions of
liberal education facing uncomprehending hordes of venal politicians and careerist parents. The
problem is cultural, and we advocates of liberal education are in part responsible for the
uncomprehending hordes.
Why do almost all of our politicians come from the ranks of lawyers, businessmen, or
professional office-seekers? Because of specialization. What societal institution is most
responsible for extreme specialization? Higher education. To the extent that those of us involved
in higher education have acquiesced to the historical trend toward ever-increasing specialization
and ever-diminishing liberal learning, we are responsible for raising up people who are incapable
of seeing beyond the blinders imposed by their specialties. Is it any wonder that such people do
not understand liberal education or its importance to the individual and to humanity?
The situation for liberal education will get better when integral citizens from all walks of life take
an active part in all the institutions that nourish our democracy.
No one can bring this about but us. So let’s get to work.
Thank you.
�
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The challenges to liberal education and St. John's College in the twenty-first century
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Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Christopher Nelson at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus.
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What is Liberal Education For?
A Conference at St. John’s College
on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe Campus
October 16-18, 2014
Mahan Mirza
Dean of Faculty, Zaytuna College
Liberal Education at a Muslim College: Between Authority and Audacity
With special attention to conversations among the faculty of America’s first
Muslim undergraduate liberal arts college – Zaytuna College – this paper argues that
the tension between religious authority and a spirit of free inquiry can be balanced
by embracing a classical definition of the “liberal arts” as “tools to free the mind.”
The paper revolves around the challenge of grounding students within the creedal,
legal, and mystical teachings of Sunni Islam, with all its diversity, in the context of a
western liberal arts program. On the one hand, a curriculum that aims to meet such
a challenge must first perform the function of transmission of sacred knowledge as
it has crystallized within a particular school of thought in Muslim intellectual
history. The transmission process should affirm truth claims that are embedded in a
tradition of faith and practice that is normative. On the other hand, given that the
setting of a liberal classroom is potentially shared by students who have inherited
rival truth claims, or have none at all, the curriculum should also allow for a
balancing of conviction and authority with respect for and openness to diverse or
even antagonistic perspectives. Liberal education assumes a spirit of open and free,
if not audacious, inquiry that can be anathema to absolute truth claims affirmed on
the basis of religious authority. A reconciliation is possible by embracing the
�qualitative tools of logic, grammar, and rhetoric that lie at the heart of both
theological reasoning and disciplined free inquiry. 1
If we bracket the issue of origins for a moment, then every individual is heir
to customs, norms, webs of ideas, and social structures – in other words, heir to
some tradition. 2 How could the enterprise of education begin anywhere but there
through the process of cultural initiation, habituation, and formal transmission? It is
undoubtedly for this reason that one of the icons of the modern Great Books
movement, Robert Maynard Hutchins, noted that “no man was educated unless he
was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition.” 3 In science, this fact has
come to be identified with the term “paradigm,” within the parameters of which
“normal science” operates. In the realm of human culture, perhaps a good equivalent
word for paradigm is “tradition.” It represents that which has been deemed valuable
for transmission and continuity, about which there is fundamental agreement,
distilled from the many trials and errors of the past, by “authorities” who are its
harbingers and teachers. As in the case of normal science, the legitimacy of tradition
is directly proportional to its explanatory power, realized only insofar as a
community freely gives assent to it – it being the complex of ideas, scholars, and
This first paragraph was part of the original abstract submitted for the conference. The following remainder
of the abstract is not part of the final paper: “Appealing to John Walbridge’s God and Logic in Islam, Mark van
Doren’s Liberal Education, Brittanica’s Great Books Series edited by Hutchins and Adler, and an edited
volume on The Classical Foundations of Muslim Education, the paper highlights the imperative of integrating
Muslim intellectual history with Western intellectual history and of ultimately seeing them not as distinct but
rather as interconnected and interdependent. The paper also serves as an invitation to share in the dream of
an eventual consortium among text-based programs of liberal studies that are secular (e.g. St. John’s) and
religious (e.g. Thomas Aquinas and Zaytuna) for providing instructors and students structured avenues for
mutual enrichment, and for providing ambitious citizens access to shared institutional resources for lifelong
learning.”
2 Alasdair Macintyre’s definition of tradition is helpful: “A tradition is an argument extended through time in
which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined” in conversation with ongoing debates that
lie both within that tradition but also in traditions that are extraneous to it. (Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, p. 12). Hodgson also speaks to the idea of high culture that
is discursive and of the so-called literate (one could say “scholarly”) class as representative of intellectual
traditions of civilizations (see his Venture of Islam, Vol. 1).
3 In “The Great Conversation,” which is Vol. 1 of the Great Books series by Brittanica (1952 and 1990).
1
�institutions that receive, process, and transmit tradition from generation to
generation; the keyword here being process.
Now, in the case of science, a paradigm shifts through the accumulation of a
sufficient number of anomalies that the prevailing framework simply cannot
appropriate or explain. The cognitive process that precisely guides the jump from
one paradigm or theoretical configuration with less explanatory power to another
with more explanatory power remains a mystery. 4 What is key, however, is the
awareness of a meta-theoretical framework that permits the shift – which is
inevitably traumatic from a socio-historical perspective – in the first place. To
analogize: tradition becomes dead if it views in the process of transmission an
activity that is absolute and final, willfully ignoring anomalies as they pile up ad
infinitum. However, if a tradition carries within it tools for both its own validation as
well as critique, or more crucially, is able to recognize and appropriate new tools in
discourses taking place external to it, then every generation is responsible not
merely to receive tradition, but also to reevaluate it through a process of assessment
that leads either to its wholesale embrace, partial modification, or total rejection. 5 In
this manner, the transmission of knowledge becomes the beginning, not the end, of
an intellectual project that in turn influences and shapes culture, society, and polity.
This spirit has been captured eloquently by the man of letters, Mark van Doren, in
his essay on Liberal Education. To quote at length:
Tradition is most dangerous and most troublesome when it is forgotten. It brings strength, as well as
takes it. It gives life, as well as threatens it. It is life fighting to maintain itself in time. For there is the
curious fact that tradition is never so healthy as when it is being fought. We deny its authority, but in
doing so, we use its clearest terms; and end, if we are original, in enriching it so that it may have
strength for future wars. It is orthodoxy at its best, thriving on heresies, which it digests into nobler
This is in obvious reference to Thomas Kuhn’s seminal Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Recalling Professor Frank Griffel, who in one of our graduate seminar at Yale on Ghazali grabbed my ear as
he emphasized that “every generation has to re-hear its giants.” I thought he was quoting a major philosopher
but when I contacted him recently for the reference, he said he probably just read it in some newspaper oped. I also don’t think the professor actually grabbed my ear, but the effect of his statement was jarring enough
that it is so etched in my memory.
4
5
�problems. We return to tradition not for answers, but for questions, and some of those we find are
capable, like live wires, of shocking us into a condition of dizziness or extreme heat. It is dangerous,
and it is to be feared. But it fears us as well. The hope of education is to reconcile the two strengths. 6
It is in this manner that a living tradition finds its home in a modern Western
liberal arts college. It transmits not merely past truths, but also ways to evaluate
that truth afresh in new intellectual contexts and in fresh political circumstances.
This notion of “evaluation” ought to be as true for science as it is for religious
traditions. In terms of “progress,” the reason that we see these two – science and
religion – differently is because of the drastic ways in which our conception of the
universe around us has been revised over the past few centuries due to the advance
of science. Science is concerned with material reality, with respect to which we all
stand in tangible relation. Religion, on the other hand, concerns itself with timeless
truths that are less pliable and more abstract. Nonetheless, with the gradual or rapid
accumulation of collective human experience and revisions in how we reflect on the
nature of reality, it is the task of every generation to re-examine and re-evaluate
these alleged “timeless” wisdoms and truths. If a tradition is no longer capable of
such an engagement with contemporary ideas, it will eventually cease to be
relevant, or it will end up being destructive instead of being a vibrant force for
positive change.
Taking things at face value, there are myriad reasons for the apparent failure
of Muslim tradition to keep up with the times; among them are causes social and
political, meaningful engagement with which lies beyond the scope of this paper.
However, if the assumption is correct – that Muslim tradition by and large has so far
failed to meet the challenges of modernity – then a few pressing questions present
themselves. One: why is it that many Muslims still peg their hopes in that tradition
for guidance in their everyday lives today? Two: if the tradition has failed, what
gives us hope that it could still be of any use in a project to help shape a better
6
Liberal Education, pp. 119-120.
�future for our planet? In a nutshell: why invest in a liberal arts college that takes that
very tradition as its point of origin? It is my contention here that the so-called failure
of Muslim tradition is not due to any deficiency in that tradition to meet
contemporary intellectual or spiritual challenges. Rather, what has been lacking is
the right institutional, political, and cultural setting for the tradition to operate and
to safely go about the business of not only “transmission” but also of that bolder
next step of “assessment and revision.”
In 2011, John Walbridge published a book on God and Logic in Islam, with the
audacious subtitle: “Caliphate of Reason.” “This book is an argument for a single
proposition,” thunders Walbridge, “that Islamic intellectual life has been
characterized by reason in the service of a non-rational revealed code of conduct.” 7
He later counsels, “This book is a reminder to my Muslim friends and readers that
the core intellectual tradition of Islam is deeply rational.” 8 I, for one, welcome such a
reminder. Franz Rosenthal, one of the greatest Arabists of the twentieth century,
already highlighted this very thesis in his monograph entitled Knowledge
Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam. He constructs:
“Civilizations tend to revolve around meaningful concepts of an abstract nature
which more than anything else give them their distinctive character.” Identifying
ʿilm or “knowledge” as the concept that is the hallmark of Muslim civilization,
Rosenthal affirms, “there has been no other concept that has been operative as a
determinant of Muslim civilization in all its aspects to the same extent as ʿilm.” 9
Permeating virtually every avenue of human inquiry, Muslim scholastics
were, among other things, obsessed with concepts, letters, words, meanings, and
significations, given that the entire fabric of human existence was woven and made
sensible through the words of Revelation. As such, grammarians, logicians,
Walbridge, p. 3.
Walbridge, p. 4.
9 Rosenthal, p. 2.
7
8
�theologians, jurists, and mystics – not to mention scientists and philosophers –
endeavored to exhaust the possibilities of meaning that could inhere in words in a
world defined primarily by Aristotelian realism, but one that also entertained
healthy challenges to it. The system of education in premodern Muslim madrasas
could, in that sense, be equated with what we consider to be liberal arts proper, in
that they systematically trained students in grammar, logic, and rhetoric. 10 In that
sense, what we call Muslim tradition today already went through a process of
transmission, assessment, and revision, when it came into contact with the
Hellenistic intellectual milieu in the first few centuries of Islam. In the words of the
intellectual historian Dimitri Gutas and successor of Rosenthal: “The Graeco-Arabic
translation movement of Baghdad constitutes a truly epoch-making stage, by any
standard, in the course of human history. It is equal in significance to, and belongs to
the same narrative as, I would claim, that of Perlicles’ Athens, the Italian
Renaissance, or the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and it deserves to be recognized and embedded in our historical consciousness.” 11
It has been shown that traditional systems of education in the Muslim world
were mostly “liberal” in character until, ironically, their dismantling in favor of
“modern” educational projects introduced by the West. This shift is understandable
because the West was not interested in producing enlightened and free thinkers, but
rather individuals who would be “useful” – meaning “unfree” or “slaves” in the
Aristotelian sense – for the furtherance of a colonial project. Towards the end of his
book, Walbridge refers to a certain Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, principal of the
Government College, Lahore, who published a study entitled History of Indigenous
Education in the Punjab to the Year 1882, where he observed that “there had been
seven educational systems functioning in the Punjab before British rule”…Islamic
10 This is the main argument in John Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason (Cambridge
University Press, 2010). See also Medhi Nakosteen, History of the Islamic Origins of Western Education;
Bayard Dodge, Muslim Education in Medieval Times; and edited volume on Classical Foundations of Islamic
Education.
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, p. 8.
11
�using Arabic and Persian, Hindu and Sikh, using Sanskrit and classical Punjabi, and
other vernacular systems… “He [i.e. Leitner] argued that each was a traditional
literary educational system, precisely analogous to the curriculum of Latin and
Greek classics that formed the basis of most European education at the time.” 12
British educational reforms in India to further a colonialist agenda produced a
generation that was not connected to its past, lost in the present, and unable to
imagine or shape its future.13
I think that, as Dorothy Sayers reminds us in The Lost Tools of Learning, in
order to go forward, we need to go back. 14 In Karachi, Habib University, for example,
which just opened up its doors in 2014, has realized that the answer to the problems
that confront Pakistan and the region lie not in building more educational
institutions that churn out technocrats and bureaucrats, but in a program of liberal
education that prepares individuals for what they call “thoughtful self-cultivation.” 15
The key point of this paper is that such a “liberal” turn is not one that is away from
Muslim tradition, but rather, towards it.
In conclusion: A liberal arts education is typically associated with creativity,
innovation, reason, and discovery. Traditional Islamic education, on the other hand,
is associated with memorization, trustworthy authorities, and the transmission of
knowledge. In fact, the word “innovation” is anathema to traditional Muslim
sensitivities. One hadith (saying of the Prophet) that is quoted in almost every
Friday congregational prayer includes the warning: “the worst things are newly
Walbridge, pp. 157-160.
M. Qasim Zaman shows how ulama can still be vibrant through the madrasa system, so it is plausible that
healthy reform will continue to come from centers of traditional learning that have survived the onslaught of
colonialism. See The ‘Ulama in Contemporary Muslim Thought.
14 Cf. Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
15 Habib University, http://habib.edu.pk/.
12
13
�invented matters [in religion], and every newly invented matter is an innovation,
and every innovation is misguidance, and all misguidance is in the fire.” 16
So what would it mean to put the two together – creativity, innovation,
reason, and discovery, with memorization, authority, and transmission – into a
Muslim liberal arts curriculum? This tension between religious authority and a
spirit of free inquiry can be balanced by embracing a classical definition of the
“liberal arts” as “tools to free the mind,” to “learn how to learn,” for “lifelong
learning.” This paper has argued that authority is not something to be shunned or
disregarded. On the contrary, every framework for inquiry is accompanied by
uncritical assumptions that are accepted initially at face value. These merely have to
be accepted and appropriated, instead of ignored and wished away. What
legitimizes them is a community in which one’s formation and learning takes place.
What makes the learning meaningful over time is if it provides the critical
tools that allow the very authority that initiates the process to eventually be
challenged and, if necessary, transcended if necessary. However, as the focus
remains on tools and continuity, then there is a constant that always accompanies
the change – what changes remains the same as what it has changed into – in a sort
of timeless embrace of what lies at the heart of being human: the use of our rational
faculties to understand the universe, its cause/creator, our place in it, and who we
are, in conversation with the best answers to these questions that have been offered
in the past. The process and method of rational inquiry in Muslim tradition in
pursuit of answers to these great questions is ultimately shared by other faiths, and
also by secular modernity. So long as the rational possibility of the existence of
revealed truths remains open, it is a legitimate exercise of human reason to
investigate its claims. Catholics, Muslims, and others, will come to both common and
divergent understandings of truth when the tools of systematic reasoning and
16
Reported by numerous authorities.
�argumentation are applied to make sense of their respective scriptures, and
secularists will also arrive at their own conclusions when they choose to bracket
God altogether. Along the way, mediated by shared principles of reason and our
experience of living in the world, the various conversation partners may
occasionally find ways to come together, as we have here in these few days at the
Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College, in a mutually enriching exchange where we all
get to know one another and our respective traditions, and thereby, hopefully, even
ourselves just a little better. 17
And what can be more human a venture than that?
17
I am thinking of Qur’an 49:13 and 59:19.
�
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Liberal education at a Muslim college : between authority and audacity
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Text
Why the Case for the Liberal Arts is Stronger than Ever
Wilfred M. McClay
University of Oklahoma
If we are to make a persuasive case for the liberal arts, we must first have a reasonably
coherent notion of what the liberal arts are, and what they are for. That means
clearing away some persistent misconceptions.
To begin with, the term “liberal arts” shouldn’t be understood as a synonym for “the
humanities,” or for those “soft” disciplines that are offered as complements to the
“hard” disciplines of science and mathematics. In fact, the serious study of science
and mathematics forms just as essential a part of a liberal education. And teaching the
liberal arts is not just a matter of imparting certain analytical techniques, even if the
liberal arts do impart those skills extremely well as a byproduct of their work, skills
that are readily transferable to other areas of human endeavor. The “liberal arts” do
not refer to a particular content area or a particular body of knowledge, although their
exercise may well involve the acquisition of such a body of knowledge. They are not
reducible to a lengthy list of books that must be read, or to languages that must be
mastered, or to concepts with which one must be demonstrably conversant—
1
�although all those things will contribute in indispensable ways to the pursuit of a
liberal education.
Instead, the mark of a genuinely liberal education is that it aims at instilling a set of
paradoxical qualities, which are often quite fiercely at odds with one another. Those
qualities can be grouped under two broad rubrics: the capacity for inquiry, and the
capacity for membership.
Let me illuminate what I am saying by providing a specific example.
A number of years ago, when I was still a fairly junior professor on the faculty at
Tulane, I went to an academic conference in San Francisco whose subject was the
purpose of the modern university. It was well-attended, and featured two outstanding
plenary speakers, both of whom were received very warmly by their audiences.
The first was the historian C. Vann Woodward, who was receiving a luncheon award
for his long and illustrious career, and particularly for his commitment to free speech
and free investigation. In his remarks, Woodward put forward a bold and
uncompromising view of what the university’s appropriate work consisted in. “The
university,” he declared, “is the place where the unthinkable can be thought, the
unspeakable can be said, the inconceivable can be conceptualized, and the
2
�unfashionable can be entertained.” (I quote from memory here, which may be
unreliable in particulars but is entirely reliable in capturing the thrust of Woodward’s
remarks.) The university, and it alone, offered the world a place consecrated to the
most precious and most imperiled aspect of human freedom: our freedom of thought,
freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression. Without strong institutional
protections for such freedoms against the forces that always seemed to spring up
against them, we would lose the benefit of them, including the benefits that come of a
culture that is bent upon seeking and finding the truth, without fear or favor. Visibly
stirred by these words, and by the distinguished career of the man who uttered them,
the audience applauded loud and long, and I joined them.
Then later in the day came an address by the political scientist James Q. Wilson, also
speaking on the theme of the university’s purpose. In his speech, Wilson argued that
the modern university was best understood as the chief conservator of the rich but
fragile civilization of the Western world, the keeper of our chief intellectual, moral,
and artistic treasures and our collective historical memory. That heritage had made us
what, and who, we are; but our dynamic commercial and progressive culture was all
too likely to toss that heritage aside, in the pell-mell pursuit of the next big thing. If
the university did not take care to look after the older things, he asked, who else
would? Without a strong institutional commitment to the conservation and
propagation of that cultural inheritance, we would lose the benefit of it, including the
3
�benefits that come of sustaining a vital connection to the past, and to the best that has
been thought and expressed in the human experience. For these words, too, the
audience applauded loud and long, and again I joined them enthusiastically, though by
now experiencing a bit of puzzlement at them, and at myself.
Puzzlement, because it struck me that the audience, and I myself, seemed to be
applauding, with equal enthusiasm, two entirely different, and seemingly incompatible,
ideals of the university. Woodward seemed to be holding up the university as a place
of constant unsettlement, even creative destruction, in which everything that is taken
for truth today is open at every moment to being rethought, reframed, and
reconstituted, and even discarded, a place in which no dogma is safe and no
complacency is tolerated—a place in which ideas and ideals can have validity only so
long as they can stand up to the intense and uninhibited refining fire of today’s most
impertinent questions and searing criticisms.
Wilson, on the other hand, was pushing for an ideal of the university which stood
precisely against the arrogant and self-absorbed tendency of the modern world to
appoint itself the plenipotentiary judge of all things, to deny and disparage the
authority of all that has come before it, and in so doing, to ensure that those who
come after it will accord it the same treatment, in the fullness of time. Wilson’s
university was instead a place where the young would be educated to take up the
4
�fullness of their cultural inheritance, to become literate and conversant in its many
features, and to fully appropriate all that it has to offer them.
These are two very different-sounding ideas about the nature of higher education.
And yet we applauded them both with roughly equivalent fervor. Were we, the
audience, being mindless fools, or emotional pushovers, or merely being polite to a
fault, in doing so? Or might there be a deeper logic linking them, one that neither
speaker sought to illuminate, but that we need to take to heart in our own attempt to
understand what the value of a college education, and particularly one in the liberal
arts, ought to be in the present day?
I think there is, in fact, a deeper sense in which these two different accounts of the
university are merely different aspects of the same vision: a vision of education as a
preparation for freedom, in the fullest sense of the term—freedom not as mere
license, nor as a life lived unfettered by constraints or coercions or traditions, nor for
that matter as a life lived in the easy-going, conflict-free adjustment of one’s wants
and expectations to the world as one finds it, but freedom as rational self-government,
as a regimen of risks and rewards, a freedom grounded in a fruitful combination of
membership and inquiry, of reverence and criticism—a freedom that releases us from
the unquestioned tutelage of the past, but in a way that enables us to draw sustenance
from the past rather than aiming at making us wantonly disdainful of it. Wilson’s
5
�university would bring to its charges the blessings of a more fully conscious and
informed membership in the society of which they are already a part; while
Woodward’s university would give them space for skeptical inquiry, the ability to
engage in the acts of radical questioning and criticism, including civilizational selfcriticism, which represent one of the chief means by which that society has been
induced to improve itself, and redress its deficiencies. The best university, the one that
teaches the liberal arts, is the one that does both of these things at the same time.
Hence we were right to applaud both speakers at that convention, for we need both
messages. Membership without inquiry is stale traditionalism; inquiry without
membership is captiousness or kibitzing, living like the poker player who doesn’t take
a stake in the game. The end in view is that of substituting informed loyalties for blind
ones, and substituting conscious reasonableness, and uncoerced love, for fear and
dependency and superstition and reflex action. It is a freedom that comes of seeing all
that one has formerly known in a larger arena, within a larger frame, as a part of a
larger reality—not to reject it, but to see it all in, as we say, a new and wondrous light.
That image, of seeing all things freshly when they have been freshly illuminated by the
emergence of profounder sources of light, will make many of us think of one of the
greatest and most imperishable parables of education: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in
the seventh book of the Republic. You all know the story, a strange, even weird tale
6
�of people who have been compelled since birth to view images cast upon a wall as if
they were the only real things in existence, and of the disturbing revelations that come
to them when they are released from their bondage, and brought into the blinding
light of day—brought to see things as they really are. The same parable has been
related in various ways: in the various understandings of the veil of Maya in Hinduism
and Buddhism, or of the “evil demon” in Descartes’s Meditations, who so orders the
world as to deceive us, or the 1999 science-fiction movie called The Matrix, in which
the mass of humanity has been constrained to experience only a simulation of reality
created by all-controlling life-devouring computers. Or even in something as familiar
to all Americans as the movie The Wizard of Oz, in which the title character turns out
to be a purveyor of trickery. What all these narratives reinforce is a powerful, and
sometimes haunting, apprehension that we might be living our lives under the spell of
a complete illusion, whether imposed by others or by ourselves; that the process of
freeing ourselves from that illusion is likely to be painful and unsettling, that it can
involve a complete transformation of all that was familiar, and a complete
redescription of reality itself, in the name of the search for truth. And the stakes are
very high. Those illuminati who return to the cave, Plato warns us, are likely to be
killed by those who have never left the cave, who prefer not to have their illusions
disturbed.
7
�But our experience is rarely as dramatic and extreme as that. And Plato’s great
allegory, and the other versions of this theme, do not tell the whole story about
education, which is just as often a tale of delight and discovery and enchantment as it
is one of painful displacement. I fear that Plato’s allegory may mislead us by
emphasizing only one part of the effort of liberal education, the process of disabusing
and disillusioning, of weakening the stranglehold of the present and the past on us,
for the sake of better apprehending the possibilities that beckon from beyond.
An argument I find more helpful and reliable comes from a small book by the late
historian Jaroslav Pelikan, called The Vindication of Tradition. Drawing upon an essay by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pelikan offers up a distinction between “tradition” and
“insight,” and then goes on to show how unsustainable that distinction actually is:
A “leap of progress” is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of
where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to
where we go next. The growth of insight—in science, in the arts, in philosophy
and theology—has not come through progressively sloughing off more and
more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has
finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the
history of the tradition, and it does not work that way now. By including the
dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation. Of
8
�course we do not listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape recording of the
tradition….But we do acquire the insight for which Emerson was pleading
when we learn to interact creatively with the tradition which he was
denouncing.
And Pelikan concludes his examination with a charge to the reader, taken from
Goethe’s Faust:
What you have as heritage,
Take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own.
In this view, the point of studying the tradition is not to absolve us of the need to
think for ourselves, or relieve us of the responsibility to build things of our own. On
the contrary. The tradition helps us to recognize the work we are meant to do. Our
heritage is our task. It gives our world its defining contours, its horizons, and its
specific possibilities, its problems to be solved. We cannot know or undertake our
task without the benefit of our heritage. But it is by doing our task that we can come
into the full possession of that heritage—thereby perpetuating the tradition as
something living, rather than something moribund—and thereby making it possible
for us to have a free and full relationship with that heritage, like that of children who
9
�have fully grown up, and can at last see and embrace their parents and forebears for
the people they actually are, and can come into fully adult possession of their
inheritance.
So the Platonic allegory is not fully adequate to the task of description here. But then
neither is Woodward’s description of the university as a relentless and unsparing
critique, or Wilson’s of the university as an agency of reverent cultural transmission.
What might fit Pelikan’s description best is the idea of education as a Bildungsroman or
narrative journey, but only if one adds the qualification that it is a narrative journey
that culminates in a homecoming, the kind of story that we call an odyssey. “We shall
not cease from exploration,” wrote T. S. Eliot, in “Little Gidding,” “And the end of
all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first
time.” Such is the task of a liberal education, rightly understood, as a liberating
exploration that results, not in our being made permanently uprooted and alienated,
but in our becoming more fully at home in the world that we already inhabit, and
more fully able to enhance it, beautify it, ennoble it, and sustain it. An inquiry that
draws upon, challenges, but ultimately affirms and strengthens, our sense of
membership in that world. In fact, an inquiry whose pursuit is part and parcel of our
belonging, and which makes tradition and insight into partners, rather than foes. The
truly wise cosmopolitan knows, as Dorothy told us, that there’s no place like home.
10
�I think the contribution of liberal education to our public life ought to be clear
enough from what I have said so far. Of course, I recognize, as does everyone at this
conference, that the educational institutions that are the principal venue for liberal
education are imperiled on all sides by problems of excessive cost and uncertain
results, and that there are hard questions to be asked about questions of access and
economic feasibility and practicality. I don’t mean to brush those questions aside. But
I think that before we make a potentially fatal decision to change forever what we do,
and adapt the end to the means, or the perceived means, we need to think very hard
about what the end of liberal education really is.
We should also consider the fact that we live at what is arguably the most prosperous
moment in the entire history of the human race. The standard of living that even the
most common among us enjoys today would be the envy of kings and queens in ages
past. Is it really credible then to say—at precisely this moment—that the pursuit of
the highest and best kind of education is something that much poorer peoples and
times were right to seek, but that we can no longer afford? Can we hear how absurd it
sounds for us to be saying such things?
The chief public benefit of liberal education, when it is functioning successfully, is the
formation of a particular kind of person, someone who is also capable of being a
particular kind of citizen, who robustly embodies the virtues of both inquiry and
11
�membership, and therefore is equipped for the work of truth-seeking deliberation and
responsible action that a democratic form of government requires. Such a person has
an ability to draw back from the flow of events and reflect upon them, the ability to
consult the voice of reason and the wise testimony of the past. Such a person has the
cognitive and moral strength to see the world as it is, and not be fooled into mistaking
a succession of images projected onto the walls of caves, or conjured on screens, for
reality, no matter how large the images or how pervasive their presence. And no
matter how many others around them have been gulled or deceived into believing in
those images.
Which is a way of acknowledging that Plato’s great allegorical image of liberation
remains at the core of education, even if it does not constitute the whole of it. Before
we can do anything truly magnificent and lasting, we must be drawn out of our
various caves. We must be liberated from the sirens of propaganda, or the
enchantments of virtual experience, before we can accomplish anything worthwhile. It
is probably too extreme to argue that we are inhabiting our own soft-core version of
the Matrix. But it is not at all extreme to believe that an unhealthy proportion of our
experience, and particularly the experience of the young, has come to be mediated and
directed and channeled and simulated by the artificial instrumentalities we use to
apprehend the world, instrumentalities that compel our imaginations to believe in a
world that they—and not we—conjure into being. Such a tendency carries with it
12
�great dangers, both for our ability to think clearly and attentively, and our ability to
draw on our own imaginations with vividness, intensity, and independence, not to
mention its undercutting the patterns of restrained and civil public deliberation that a
genuinely democratic society requires. In the years to come, it will be a greater and
greater part of a genuine liberal education to counteract these less benign effects of
our ghostly electronic cave, and restore us to ourselves—restore our ability to hear
and see and touch the earth for ourselves, to gaze at the night sky for ourselves, and
bring us back into contact with the exhilarating, wind-swept heights of our human
freedom, in which the game of life is being played for keeps. And give us, through
hard study of old books and the hard but delightful work of conversation, an
enduring and unsimulated participation in human excellence, a drink of our own,
drawn from that deep reservoir of shared wisdom of which Herman Melville was
speaking, when he wrote that “Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and
one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” That study, that drink—that
shock—usher us into a profoundly public world, a shared world, the highest common
denominator—a world beyond all caves and matrices, and yet a world to which we
can belong fully, if we wish to.
####
13
�
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“Teaching Philosophy in College: The Effectual Truth”
Daniel P. Maher
16 October 2014
Conference: What Is Liberal Education For?
A Conference at St. John’s College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe Campus
Panel: Underpinnings of an Education in the Classics
Abstract: Philosophical education at the collegiate level has become increasingly difficult in recent
years. Obstacles arise due to the preparedness of the students, the composition of the faculty, and the
character of American academic institutions. A decisive shift has made it reasonable to regard
institutions of higher learning as primarily devoted to preparing students for gainful employment rather
than to cultivating their minds. In schools where philosophy courses are still required and teachers try to
communicate to their students and their colleagues the centrality of philosophy within education, there is
a danger that we overlook the permanent obstacles to philosophy within human nature. In what sense is
philosophy both a peak achievement of human intelligence and something to be required for and
beneficial to every student? Classical philosophy (paradigmatically Plato) identifies a certain disharmony
between philosophy and the city; Descartes (Enlightenment philosophy generally) suggests that
philosophy can be universally beneficial and harmonious with the concerns of ordinary life. Can
philosophy in the classical tradition be presented in an Enlightenment mode?
Part One: Our Context
Teaching philosophy in college today is impossible. This thesis can be proved through at least
eight middle terms.1 I take some solace from the fact it has always been impossible, and yet it has
happened. So teaching philosophy is almost always impossible. Insofar as this is a practical problem,
our goal is not the best education simply, but the best we can reasonably aim at in our circumstances.
By “our circumstances” I mean, first, the smallish, Catholic liberal arts college, within which there
yet remains something of the Catholic emphasis on philosophy, tenuously allied now with other concerns
like providing job credentials and de-‐‑occidentalizing the curriculum as far as possible, except in science. I
1 One can find insuperable obstacles in our regime, our schools, and our students themselves. Here is one
list of eight obstacles.
1. Self-‐‑esteem and the death of eros.
2. Functional illiteracy of the students.
3. Relativism, post-‐‑modernism, race-‐‑class-‐‑genderism.
4. Opposition from colleagues, who are not liberally educated.
5. Commercialization and professionalization of colleges.
6. Scientism.
7. Shrunken curriculum.
8. American anti-‐‑philosophical character.
�speak not of unusual places like St. John’s, but of schools like my own Assumption College, schools more
or less devoted to the liberal arts, more or less Catholic, and more or less tending from the more to the
less. I am eager to learn how the matters about which I speak appear to this audience.
Teaching philosophy in these circumstances has a horizontal and a vertical trajectory. We require
philosophy of all students as essential to their education, and yet we try to preserve openness to the
highest peak made possible by the pursuit of philosophy. Needless to say, such a peak is reserved for the
rarest of students. And nevertheless, if we lose sight of that vertical trajectory, we popularize philosophy
so that it becomes something else. Without wisdom in the highest sense as its goal, philosophical
education easily becomes subordinated to goals defined by citizenship or some similarly parochial bias
the institution finds it reasonable to pursue.
When I say teaching philosophy is impossible, I adapt a thesis defended by John Haldane, who
distinguishes an instrumentalized education from one where “an essential aspect of the value of
education is intrinsic to it.” He associates the former with utilitarian progressives like Bentham and
Spencer, and to them he opposes first Matthew Arnold, alongside whom he lines up John Stuart Mill,
John Henry Newman, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, all of whom agree that the point of an
education is the cultivation of the mind as distinct from training for what we now call professional work.2
Arnold prizes intellectual perfection as more important for modern democracy than are economic
successes or the empowerment of voters.
According to Haldane, the goal of education, as understood by Plato, Newman, and the rest, was
this noble idea of perfection, but it
2 “[T]he idea which culture sets before us of perfection . . . is an idea which the new democracy needs far
more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial
performances,” (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49). Arnold’s “perfection” is distinguished not only from
Philistinism (which he equates with coarseness of soul and especially the pursuit of material
advancement) from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. His “perfection” includes a kind of moral
and religious cultivation.
2
�can only be effectively pursued through the kind of intensive education and formation that
involves a relatively small number of students in each class tutored by a widely read and
committed teacher. . . . This combination is impossible in a mass higher education system; and,
the possibility of continuing to fund such a system even with lower educational ambitions is
proving too much for the states and populations of Western Europe and for parts of North
America.3
To be precise here, Haldane says the combination of means necessary to pursue this goal effectively—or
perhaps efficiently—is impossible.
Why? The obstacles are legion; dozens of recent books and articles analyze and lament the decay
of higher education. I limit myself to two points: Haldane’s observation about the condition of our
educational institutions and a more complicated set of observations about our colleagues, which I borrow
from another essay by Haldane,4 in which he identifies philosophy as the source of much trouble.
Haldane attaches the impossibility of effectively teaching philosophy mainly to the fact that
institutions are not and no longer can be devoted to the cultivation of the mind. Instead, they have come
to be dominated by the function of training students for employment and by the pursuit of prestige
through research. To be clear, he distinguishes research, understood as the acquisition of new knowledge
in a quasi-‐‑Weberian sense, from scholarship, where teachers deeply appropriate the universal and
permanent significance of the tradition they transmit. Because even colleges tend to be dominated by the
goals of training for employment and of pursuing research, “there is no going back in general to the
conception of Arnold, Newman, and Mill.”5 (740). Haldane seems to regard this as an immovable
sociological fact, and I see no reason to doubt him.
With respect to our colleagues, the situation is more complicated. Let us stipulate that they are
exceptionally competent in their respective fields. Nevertheless, many of them not only do not have the
kind of education they are responsible to help transmit, they actively aim at the destruction of what
3 John Haldane, “The Future of the University: Philosophy, Education, and the Catholic Tradition,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87:4 (2013), 736.
4 John Haldane, “Educational Studies and the Map of Philosophy,” British Journal of Educational Studies
60:1 (March 2012): 3–15.
5 Haldane, “Future,” 740.
3
�would need to be preserved. According to John Agresto,6 a liberal arts education does two things well:
preserve the great thoughts and question the contemporary culture. These two activities are now under
assault within the academy. Haldane shows how that attack is itself the product of educators’ uncritical
allegiance to recent philosophical thinking. On Haldane’s view, during the past one hundred years or so,
the “map of philosophy” has been dominated by two streams of thought: continental postmodernism on
the one hand and analytic naturalism on the other. Teachers have absorbed vulgarized forms of these
traditions as if they held the saving truth or, at least, as providing the certainty prerequisite to open
contempt for the philosophical discipline of asking whether one’s guiding opinions are actually true.
Some teachers are the victims of a little philosophy, which they do not recognize as philosophy and on
the basis of which they deliver denunciations of philosophy, thereby exhibiting open and disdainful
pride balanced by unwitting folly.
If I sound harsh here, I don’t exempt myself from the kind of mistake at issue: blindness to the
gaps in one’s own education and in one’s grasp of the nature of education, that is to say, not knowing
that one does not know and not knowing what one needs to know are the permanent obstacles to
philosophy. Haldane describes one form of this in contemporary academics, but this kind of problem
afflicts almost all of us almost all of the time. We all feel wise sometimes, and we are normally most
tiresome to others in those moments.
According to Haldane, the humanities side of the academy tends to be inhabited by
postmodernists, who descend from one response to what they recognized as the failure of Kantianism.
That response was to question the presuppositions of the tradition, which, they argued, failed to see that
our finitude and contingency enervate us; what we most need is not to contemplate the truth, but to
6 See his “Are the Liberal Arts a Universal Good, or Are They Simply Something Western? Bringing the
Liberal Arts to Iraq.” This lecture was delivered at a Wilson Center Symposium entitled “The Liberal
Arts and the Human Condition: Collegiate Education and the Challenge of Modernity” on 19 November
2013, at Hampden-‐‑Sydney in Virginia.
4
�understand our “experience and the possibilities for action.”7 According to the descendants of this view,
education empowers us to expose false consciousness, to delegitimize the artificial categories of race,
class, and gender, and to open the way to politicized re-‐‑appropriation of the tradition. Thus, education
becomes a form of socialization or training for practical involvement in a culturally diverse world.8
The scientific side of the academy tends to be inhabited by people influenced by analytic
philosophy. This tradition, Haldane says, with its emphasis on logic, language, and mathematics,
excelled first at debunking intellectual pretensions, exposing fallacies, and eliminating confusions and
empty verbiage. It has more recently allied itself with the reductive naturalism of scientistic neuro-‐‑
thinking. Philosophy is tolerated in the limited role of sweeping up after the sciences, but these people
do not see the extent to which they are in the grip of philosophical commitments, broadly of Cartesian
ancestry, which they do not understand.9
7 Haldane, “Educational Studies,” 11.
8 Michael Oakeshott provides a somewhat different analysis, according to which European rulers first
promoted “apprenticeship to adult life” for the poor as an alternative to the education that was
unavailable to them. The goal was to make these people more productive and more useful to the nation.
Gradually and deliberately, this goal, commonly identified as socialization, was substituted for the goal of
education understood as initiation into the inheritance of human understanding. See Michael Oakeshott,
The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
2001), esp. 77-‐‑104. Oakeshott identifies political causes, and Haldane identifies philosophical causes. It
seems to me possible that these amount to two sides of one coin. Incidentally, this socialization may be
what Nietzsche complained against: “Men are to be trained for the purposes of the age to lend a hand as
soon as possible: they are to labour in the factory of common utility before they are ripe, or rather to
prevent their ever becoming ripe––because that would be a luxury which would draw a lot of strength
from ‘the labour market’” (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss
(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1980), 41.
9 The inability of scientistic thinking to account for the activity of the scientists themselves should be but
is not plain to those who celebrate scientism. Jerry Coyne exemplifies this problem by mocking the
incompetence of philosophers to address the matter of free will in comparison to the scientists who have
finally or almost finally settled the issue. In doing so, he denies that he exists as a speaker, and he invites
us to contemplate that consciousness is an illusion. “There’s not much downside to abandoning the
notion of free will. It’s impossible, anyway, to act as though we don’t have it: you'ʹll pretend to choose
your New Year’s resolutions, and the laws of physics will determine whether you keep them. And there
are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and
contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of “me” are but
convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we
realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance
5
�
In both cases the problem arises from philosophical thinking received in the mode of
unquestionable opinion. Our situation involves trying to teach amidst teachers who propagate dogmas
that close off the opportunity to think. The irony here is that the dissemination of philosophy in a
popularized mode has contributed mightily to the difficulty of teaching philosophy in college. My point
is that opinion-‐‑induced blindness is the permanent human obstacle to philosophy. Even if all of the other
obstacles to education were removed, this one would remain, and it does remain in all of us in the
illusion that we know what we do not know.
Part Two: So What Do We Do?
Let me return to the distinction between the horizontal and the vertical trajectories of our efforts.
On the horizontal plane, we are committed to holding that philosophy is, in some sense, essential for
everybody and central to a liberal education. Among other benefits, philosophy helps students
appreciate and learn to achieve clarity of conceptual thinking, precision in drawing distinctions, and rigor
in argumentation. Philosophy helps students overcome the tendency of their education to fragment into
separate disciplines and competing methodologies. Philosophy draws attention to fundamental
questions not addressed by the several academic disciplines, and it forces the student to be mindful of
himself as the being for whom education is desirable. Whereas the other disciplines train the student
how to read actuarial tables or how to examine microorganisms, philosophy draws attention to the more
necessary concern with the being on this end of microscope and this side of the green eye shades.
— of the genes we’re bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can
go about building a kinder world.” Jerry A. Coyne, “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will,” USA Today 1
January 2012, accessed 8 April 2014, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-‐‑01-‐‑
01/free-‐‑will-‐‑science-‐‑religion/52317624/1. Coyne condescends to us at the same moment that he
disqualifies himself as a speaker. As Aristotle says of the person who so undercuts himself, he is no
better than a plant; one does not argue with a plant. See Metaphysics IV.4.1006a13–15. Incidentally, recent
biological studies suggest that comparing Jerry Coyne to a plant may be unfair to plants. See Michael
Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant,” The New Yorker 89:42 (23 and 30 December 2013): 92–105. Pollan describes
especially the work of Stefano Mancuso, but there are other scientists investigating similar lines of
research. See Oliver Sacks, “The Mental Life of Plants and Worms, Among Others” The New York Review
of Books LXI:7 (24 April 2014): 4–8.
6
�
This approach protects some intrinsic value to education, but it still tends to instrumentalize it
and to subordinate philosophy to intellectual skills needed in all walks of life and for making people
capable of governing themselves and living well in a republic.10 Success in those goals is not yet the
perfection of the human soul in wisdom, which is not by any plausible stretch the fruit of two or three
required courses in a gen ed curriculum.
So how do we understand undergraduate philosophy courses? Do we abandon wisdom or the
pursuit of wisdom as a telos while we cater to the capacities of most students, or do we go through the
motions with the majority while we sift through them for the rare person who has the gift and the
appetite for a philosophical life? Can we try to do justice to both concerns simultaneously? Are we
willing to say out loud that we have one very modest goal with most students and another more serious
goal with the very few? What do we hope to accomplish with most students? Perhaps we aim to foster
in them an opinion that philosophy is good and valuable. We want them to recognize that fundamental
opinions or commitments structure our personal and political lives and that philosophical thinking
shapes our science, our politics, and every aspect of our thinking lives. We may tell them that philosophy
can help them live better.
Harmony between the ordinary concerns of human life and philosophy is presupposed in the
notion that all human beings should be educated and education should include philosophy. But
philosophy has not always been so conceived. Plato’s Apology of Socrates in particular seems to invite or
even require us to recognize that the tension between philosophy and the city is not accidental.
Philosophy teaches people to question what the family and the city tell them is good and true. If we
genuinely awaken the power to question, there is little telling where it will lead. Averroes and Aquinas
10 Jacob Klein identifies the “most serious” obstacle to liberal education as arising from the relation to the
political community. On the one hand, preservation of political form requires attention to education, and
yet education “conceived as a means to an end, a political end” cannot be the same as an education
ordered to “genuine searching and questioning.” See Jacob Klein, “The Idea of Liberal Education,” in
Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s
College Press, 1985), 168–70.
7
�both studied Aristotle. Perhaps the emancipation of young people necessitates that they question
whether their parents have been adequate guides to what is good and true, and thus the threat of
destabilizing society may be unavoidable.11 However that may be, there is a big difference in how we
understand our relation to these students: are we seeking to inculcate an opinion about the nature of
education and the place of philosophy in it, or are we seeking to awaken the power to question?
If we aim at cultivating inquiry in the deepest sense, we have limited ourselves as a matter of fact
to very few students. But when we do this, we do what philosophy alone can do. I presume we are up to
the task, but I may be too optimistic. Nietzsche suggests that capable teachers are like major league
pitchers: there are not enough to go around.12 A student with great natural gifts has probably more
opportunity now than ever before to find a seat in college, but will he or she find there a guide suited and
able to open the door to a genuinely philosophical life?
If we assume that we are up to the task and that we can spot the appropriate students, we stand
to provide them with an opportunity to enter upon what has been classically identified as the best life
available. That sounds dramatic, but it is the way of philosophy. The other goals of philosophy classes,
the goals that are the concern of the horizontal trajectory, might be well pursued by a philosophically
inclined history or literature professor. So, when we are dealing with the students who take only two or
three philosophy classes, what are we really accomplishing that could not also be accomplished in other
courses? Perhaps we generate in them a better opinion of philosophy than many of our colleagues hold.
And thus we secure for ourselves a continued seat at the table, a guaranteed slice of the curriculum. For
11 “For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will haven an element of danger
and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.” W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:
Tribeca Books, 2013), 19. Quoted by Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 65–66.
12 “There exists now almost all over such an exaggeratedly great number of higher educational
institutions that incessantly, endlessly many more teachers are needed for the same than the nature of a
people, even with rich aptitudes, is able to beget; and thus an excess of the unfit comes into these
institutions, but who gradually, through their overwhelming head count and with the instinct of ‘similis
simili gaudet,’ determine the spirit of those institutions.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our
Educational Institutions, trans. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), 64–65.
8
�what? To perpetuate our careers? What are we and our careers for? Inculcating an opinion that
philosophy is good or, at least, not that bad? Is that not the Cartesian project of disseminating the
opinion that philosophy is good for the city?
Precisely that thesis, the belief in the easy harmony of philosophy and the concerns of ordinary
life, seems to be the problem. I quote now from Richard Velkley’s analysis of the work of Richard
Kennington.
In aiming at universalizable benefits, philosophy as “Enlightenment” must remove from the
center of philosophy the sustained openness to the wondrous which cannot be universalized. Yet
if the modern founders are seeking to overcome the alienness or strangeness of philosophy, they
must first be aware of it. They must admit that the philosopher’s passion is somehow unusual.
In this awareness they still are linked with the ancients. Their success in overcoming the rift
between philosophy and non-‐‑philosophy would mean, however, the demise of that awareness.
They would found a condition, therefore, in which their act of founding would not be possible.
The success of modernity renders its origin unintelligible to its beneficiaries. This is the heart of
the present crisis.13
The present crisis is the “crisis of European civilization” spoken about by Husserl, Heidegger, and
Strauss. Velkley explains that, while modern philosophy was founded by genuine philosophers, their
“new kind of thinking endangered the existence of philosophy. Relativism, scientism, nihilism are
consequences of modern philosophy’s self-‐‑subordination to the spheres of ‘practice’ and history,” which
are the non-‐‑philosophic offspring of modern philosophy.14 Kennington understood these issues to be
encapsulated in the question, now mostly unasked, “Who is the philosopher?” I am suggesting that the
same swarm of problems is implicated in determining what we think it means to teach philosophy to
undergraduates.
Let me restate the problem on the horizontal plain. As Tocqueville indicated, what Descartes did
Americans have absorbed. “If I go further,” Tocqueville wrote, “and seek amongst these characteristics
of the human mind the principal one which includes almost all the rest, I discover that in most of the
13 Richard L. Velkley, “Masks of Mastery: Richard Kennington on Modern Origins,” Political Science
Reviewer 31 (2002): 9.
14 Ibid., 6–7.
9
�operations of mind, each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding.”15
Eva Brann calls this rationality, which is a mode of thinking distinct from reason itself. Reason is a power
of the mind, which is cultivated by inquiry, by questioning, which is directed intellectual desire.16 Reason is
stifled by methodology, by Kantian critique, and similar techniques that artificially limit inquiry before it
can begin. Rationality, by contrast, is the name for what Tocqueville describes as the peculiarly American
turn of mind. She appeals to William James as capturing the “sentiment of rationality” as the feeling of
my own intellectual sufficiency, my confidence that no one may impose his ideas on me. I don’t have to
know anything of importance or, indeed, anything in particular in order to think and decide for myself.
Descartes’s demand for certainty and the consequent doubt of all authority and of ordinary experience
have been received as the right to make up my own mind. “Who is the philosopher?” gives way to “Why
do I have to take philosophy?”
Now this is a very different question that arises without a desire to know. It is an expression
rather of a right not to need to know. How we answer this question says much about who we are.
Conclusion
When we admit as the telos of our teaching wisdom in the highest sense, it is difficult to claim
that philosophy is for everyone. Should we settle into the moderate goal of improving the perspicacity of
all, for which philosophy proper becomes non-‐‑essential, or should we abandon the ordinary student,
preserve purity of heart, and pursue without apology the rarefied and classical goal of wisdom to the best
of our ability with only the fewest of our very best students?
I doubt we can eliminate the tension between these two poles of education. As interesting as the
philosophical problem at the root of our practical problem is, our problem remains practical. I see no
15 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America vol. II, bk. 1, ch. 1; as quoted in Eva T. H. Brann, Paradoxes
of Education in a Republic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 121.
16 Brann describes reason pregnantly as she describes as “the deliberate, self-‐‑conscious activity of the
original, personal activity of thought.”
10
�reason to expect that some new plan will suddenly amend our institutions, alter our colleagues and
ourselves, and endow our students with all the intellectual qualities we might dream of. Nor do I think
there is a philosophical insight that solves the problem, as if some particular thesis that diagnoses
modernity or unravels it would provide a pedagogical solution. That approach, I think, has been
interestingly deflated by Haldane. Part of our problem is the presence of too much sophisticated
philosophy in education. He recommends adapting Tip O’Neill’s thesis that all politics is local to this
formula: “most worthwhile educational theory is contextual and practical.”17 No philosophic insight and
no institutional scheme can solve the difficulty. Those teachers do best who are alert to the possibilities
and the obstacles and pragmatic enough to do whatever can benefit a student who is open to learning.
This inclines me to do Haldane and O’Neill one better and say that all education, whenever it happens, is
individual. Eva Brann writes, “The effort of the single teacher is the ultimate resort of excellence in
education.” She continues, “I think, teachers should laboriously form an opinion concerning the
foundations of learning and then teach accordingly—alone, if necessary, and in a community of like-‐‑
minded colleagues, if they are so fortunate.”18 If this captures the situation at St. John’s, her advice is all
the more compelling for those of us who teach in more ordinary schools.
Selected Bibliography
Agresto, John. “Are the Liberal Arts a Universal Good, or Are They Simply Something Western?
Bringing the Liberal Arts to Iraq.” Lecture delivered at a Wilson Center Symposium entitled “The Liberal
Arts and the Human Condition: Collegiate Education and the Challenge of Modernity,” 19 November
2013, Hampden-‐‑Sydney in Virginia.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009.
Brann, Eva T. H. Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1979.
17 Haldane, “Educational Theory,” 14.
18 Eva T. H. Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1979), 5.
11
�
Haldane, John. “Educational Studies and the Map of Philosophy,” British Journal of Educational Studies
60:1 (March 2012): 3–15.
———. “The Future of the University: Philosophy, Education, and the Catholic Tradition,” American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87:4 (2013): 731–49.
Klein, Jacob. “The Idea of Liberal Education.” In Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays, edited by Robert
Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman, 157–70. Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Translated by Peter Preuss.
Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1980.
———. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Translated by Michael W. Grenke. South Bend, IN:
St. Augustine’s Press, 2004.
Oakeshott, Michael. The Voice of Liberal Learning. New Haven: Yale University Press; reprinted
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.
Roth, Michael S. Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2014.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Velkley, Richard. “Masks of Mastery: Richard Kennington on Modern Origins,” Political Science Reviewer
31 (2002): 6–28.
Weiss, Bari. “Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues,” WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920
Accessed 28 December 2013
12
�
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Teaching philosophy in college : the effectual truth
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1
In the Middle of a Conversation:
Reflections on Ortega y Gasset’s “The Misery and Splendor of Translation”
by Kathleen Longwaters
I wish to thank all those who have organized this conference from those who had the
first glimmer of the idea to those who put chairs in the room and water on the table. I
am grateful.
Whatever we study today, be it physics, economics, or philosophy, we are coming in on
the middle of a conversation. The past is below our feet like a watershed we draw on.
We can dig a well a right back to the source of Plato and read him in the Greek (as
Ortega y Gasset did). Or we can learn something of Nietzsche as alluded to in the
poetry of Allama Iqbal, like a tree drawing up buried water filtered through subsoil. I
claim a deep and broad understanding of one’s own intellectual history is vital for
understanding current movements in thought regardless of one’s field. Now the
questions as to what comprises “one’s own intellectual history” is worth discussing, but
will be set aside today in order to address more directly the question of: “What is
Liberal Education for?” 1
Ultimately I will claim that Liberal Education is for understanding where we stand at
the moment, for developing humility, and for encouraging courageous effort.
Furthermore, that these three are connected to each other. I am indebted to Ortega y
Gasset for these thoughts which in a way are but an echo of his own, which in turn are
also a kind of re-sounding. It is both the content of “The Misery and Splendor of
Translation” (which I will call MST) and its relation to another text, a sort of invisible
interlocutor, which has brought me here today--both figuratively and literally.
Where we stand
The silent partner in the conversation this text is having is Plato’s Meno. And common
elements in the two texts will be examined in order to illustrate the claim about a liberal
education allowing us to know where we stand. These are both exquistely rich texts and
in 20 minutes, I will only be able to give the broadest outline of what is happening here.
Out of curiosity, how many of you have read Plato’s Meno? And how many the MST?
To give a tiny bit of background, MST first appeared in a daily newspaper in
Argentina in 1937. I encountered it last fall in a course called “Translating India” along
side articles on the difficulties of translating Sanskrit into Burmese , double meanings in
Tamil poetry, and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
1
Liberal Education is neither narrow, nor strictly vocational and utilitarian.
�2
Set in this context of secondary literature in the field of translation studies, I was
perhaps slower to pick up on its fictiveness than had I encountered it in another setting.
It opens in a plausibly academic manner, presenting itself as a retelling of a
conversation at a colloquium, much like our gathering here today. There are
philologists, scientists and art historians, and Ortega himself seems to be speaking. Yet
given that the piece waxes fictive, I will call him the narrator to remind ourselves that
the opinions spoken by him may or may not entirely represent this author’s point of
view.
Probably the place the fictiveness is strongest is near the end of the piece when a
reportedly great linguist has just been talking. We get a bit of narrator comment here,
Ortega y Gasset writing: “The linguist stopped talking and stood with his sharply
pointed nose tilted up to a vague quadrant in the heavens. In the corners of his mouth
was the hint of a possible smile” (not an impossible smile.) I have the feeling this smile
is for us, and it points toward the playful almost mocking tone which weaves in and out
between a more earnest almost clinical inquisitiveness.
This great linguist gives puzzling and, at times, seemingly contradictory advice about
translation. And it is his voice which dominates the last about 20% of the article. One bit
of advice, for example, is on the proper style for translation, saying “I imagine, then, a
form of translation that is ugly, as science has always been; that does not intend to wear
literary garb.” What it means for the speaker who is in the most literary garb to say
translation ought not dress itself in literary garb is a question worth asking. This section
of the work has puzzled a number of translators such as Selby who have wondered how
to read him.
What has not been noticed, either by scholars in the field of translation studies or those
concerning themselves with Ortega y Gasset in the realm of philosophy, is the pulse of
Plato underlying this work. In structure, tone, and content MST invokes the Meno. Even
Orringer who gleaned Ortega y Gasset’s life work for references to Plato in service of
understanding the Spaniard’s philosophy, misses this work—in spite of the fact that
Plato’s name appears directly, again, in the mouth of the linguist who says only in using
his style of translation can a reader, quote, “transmigrate within poor Plato.” Perhaps
because this piece is ostensibly about translation, it was ignored. Here we see (likely)
evidence, therefore, of a narrow, discipline bound view obstructing our ability to
understand the work. The past is left out of the picture, and this is simply read as an
original and independent work. The statement by this character about the Greeks no
longer being able to function as models in any kind of positive sense probably also
throws one off the trail.
Turning now to some of the commonalities of MST and Meno, we see both open with
and revolve around a question in the format of “Can x be y-ed?” In the Meno, of course,
the question is “Can virtue be taught?” whereas the action of concern in the other work
is, not unexpectedly, translation-- with an ultimate question of “Can anything be
�3
translated?” but appearing in initially as whether “certain German philosophers” can
be. Admittedly these questions are rather different and could be argued as coincidence;
nevertheless, here virtue slides in by the 7th sentence where the narrator, speaking to his
colleagues, takes a jab at their morals, saying both are impossible in their very essence-translating or being virtuous. Humility and courage make their appearance a bit further
on.
Both Socrates and the narrator of MST try valiantly to keep the question at hand in its
most broad and overarching form, and both meet resistance from those with whom
they speak. In the famous example of the bees, Socrates teases Meno saying “while I am
looking for one virtue, I have found you to have a whole swarm of them.” The hornet’s
nest in the MST is math and science, with someone from the later field claiming his type
of writing can be translated. After giving a sort of qualified agreement that in the sense
that it exists as a language shared by scientists who happen to be living in various
countries, it can be read by each. He points out that this has to do with the fact that
these people speak the same technical language, so it is not, in this case, really
translation at all. To reverse and eliminate the idea that math and science form an
exception, he brings in Set Theory, describing it as “the branch of mathematics most in
vogue in the last quarter century,” and indeed it was. Only two years after MST is
published, Bourbaki’s work on the subject, Elements de Mathematic comes out and is
called a “monumental work” in a review in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical
Society, illustrating its reception in the field.
What is Set Theory? Most of us have encountered it in the form of overlapping circles in
the first or second grade which illustrate members shared between the two, or not
shared as the case may be. But here again we are coming in in the middle a
conversation, and we glimpse it through the MST. When Ortega y Gasset writes his
piece, Set Theory is well establish, but its acceptance some 60 years prior was, at best,
mixed. Some critics said it was not math at all, rather philosophy. Ferreiros in his recent
publication, Labyrith of Thought: A History of Set Theory and its Role in Modern
Mathematics, describes what’s at stake as Cantor’s use of the “actual infinite” versus the
“implicit infinite.” An open problem is the associated Continuum Theory which
proposes that real numbers (ie, the continuum) is a larger infinity than the infinity of
counting numbers. One does not need to be a great mathematician to get the sense of
why some folks might be uncomfortable with the idea talking about one infinity being
bigger than another infinity.
Ortega y Gasset uses “continuum” in regard to language and translation and its
impossibility, but what is most relevant here is his complaint that Menge, a term from
Set Theory, has, quote, “no possibility of being translated into our language.” This is a
complaint that mathematicians of his time were in actuality voicing, so here the
fictiveness of the piece wanes. For Ortega y Gasset this complaint is used as a way to
draw math and science back into the fold of the general question of translatability,
�4
putting them along with everything else into the category of the impossible.
Impossibility for Ortega is what can never be reached, just as the end of an infinite
series. The narrator warns, that if you divide writing into two categories, “those that can
be translated and those that cannot” that what happens is, quote, “we close the door on
the real problem every translation presents.” What that real problem is is still an open
question, though I have a hunch which I will come to later if there is time 2
But to come back to Liberal Education and now see where we stand, one could say we
stand midstream, for the echoes of the Meno point to the importance of the past for
understanding the present, but glimpses of an ongoing conversation in the field of
mathematics shows that interchange is not over. We are just one point along a way that
continues around us and before us. With too narrow a focus we miss out. A Liberal
Education allows us to see where we stand by being both broad and deep, and where
we stand is first and foremost in relation. This moves us towards humility and courage.
Humility and Courage
Now the kind of Mathematics, so to speak, most in vogue in Socrates time was
geometry. It plays a role in the Meno, but not the same role as Set Theory in MST.
Actually, Set Theory can help us visualize the overlap of these two texts. They hold in
common several elements already mentioned and others as well: A central question and
attempts at holding it in a general form, discussions of virtue, talk of being in a
muddled, speechless state, the importance of effort, a math of the day, the importance
of coming to know you don’t know, and true opinion 3. Nevertheless, the relationship
between the texts is not a simple one. Neither do these shared elements appear in the
same sequence, nor do they necessarily function the same way in the dialogues. Where
Ortega y Gasset uses the Math as a unifier, Socrates uses the Geometry to illustrate the
value of, one, reaching a muddle and, two, of learning that you don’t know what you
might have thought you did. Meno complains that Socrates has made him numb and
dumbstruck, and Socrates says he himself is so as well. In addition, the slave boy used
to work through the geometry problem, giving Meno a chance to see the process with
some distance, is also said to become “perplexed and numb” in the process of moving
from thinking he knows to understanding he does not. It is just this discovery that gives
him the impetus to search further for an answer.
In the MST we run into a muddle as well and the cause is again the presumption that
we know when we do not. Ortega y Gasset writes, “infected by the entrenched
prejudice that through speech we understand each other, we make our remarks and
listen in such good faith that we inevitably misunderstand each other much more than
if we had remained silent and guessed.” The confusion described here is a kind of
The hunch is that translating is trying to make commensurate to different infinite sets, just as in the
continuum theory. This is why you get the double exposure.
3 Some of which we do not have time to discuss more fully
2
�5
paralysis that leaves one speechless. There is not time here to go further into Ortega’s
thoughts on silence, but it does strike me that it may well be meaningful that the Meno
is a silent partner in this conversation. What is important is that in this dialogue we, like
the slave boy in the other, might come to see that we do not know what we assumed we
did.
The linguist suggests that, quote, “we need to approach the Greek and Roman
again, but not as models –on the contrary, as exemplary errors,” claiming that: “to
acquire a historical consciousness of oneself and to learn to see oneself as an error are
the same thing.” 4 This is another way of expressing that we keep discovering, in
retrospect, that we didn’t know all we thought we did. A Liberal Education, in so far as
it gives us a “historical consciousness,” therefore offers us this knowledge that we do
not know all that we think we do. Acceptance of this is tantamount to taking on
humility, a trait which the narrator in MST finds translators to have in abundance. Our
state of being in ignorance is driven home by the narrator who focuses on the past as
progenitor. He says: “Modern man is too proud of the sciences he has created. Certainly
through them the world takes on a new shape. But, relatively speaking, this innovation
is not very profound. Its substance is a delicate film stretched over other shapes
developed in other ages of humanity, which we project as our innovation. We draw
from this gigantic wealth at every opportunity, but we don’t realize it, because we
haven’t produced it; rather we have inherited it.” 5 Again, a Liberal Education allows us
to view ourselves in the present in relation to wider thought and in relation to our
inheritances from the past. The MST begins to look a bit like this delicate film stretched
over shapes developed in other ages, for the past pokes through here and there bearing
a shape reminiscent of the Meno. But as previously intimated, it is not quite the same
shape. If it were a face, the nose would be moved to the place of the ear, and the ear
tucked under the chin. Where are we left?
Ortega y Gasset describes synonyms across languages as being like a blurred
photo, saying: “The shapes of the meanings of the two fail to coincide as do those of a
person in a doubled-exposed photograph.” He goes on to speak of the dizzying
consternation of the person trying to bring the two into focus. We have a similar
problem, it seems, in trying to bring the common elements in these two texts into some
kind of clear focus where everything lines up smoothly. This brings us to effort.
Courageous Effort
My final claim for Liberal Education is that it encourages courageous effort as a result of
having shown us where we stand which is followed by a realization of our ignorance. I
would also suggest that this is the ultimate port of arrival in the two texts we have been
examining. Not ultimate in the sense of the final item in a sequence, but as in the
4
5
MST 110
Ibid. 105
�6
highest aspiration or result. This only became clear to me reading these two texts side
by side because they each reach this destination coming from entirely opposite
directions.
Another function of the Geometry in the Meno brings us to the question of the
possibility or impossibility of finding any answers at all. Meno expresses doubts about
the possibility, and Socrates says insistently: “We must, {...}, not believe that debater’s
argument, for it would make us idle-- and fainthearted men like to hear it, whereas my
argument makes them energetic and keen on the search.” 6 So learning is not for the
cowardly. It is an act here linked to courage and to effort. Learning is tied to virtue.
However, while for Socrates, on the one hand, possibility is absolutely necessary for
stimulating effort, for the narrator of MST, on the other, it is precisely impossibility
which encourages it. He argues that achieving something that was categorized as
possible would make you feel that you had achieved nothing at all. He argues in regard
to translation that:
because it would be desirable to free men from the divisions imposed by
languages, there is little probablity that it can be attained; therefore, it can
only be achieved to an approximate measure. But this approximation can
be greater or lesser, to an infinite degree, and the efforts at execution are
not limited, for there always exists the possibility of bettering, refining,
perfecting.
He goes on to say that all human activities are like this.
But what makes this effort courageous? In the MST, courage is initially tied into
the definition of good writing and is said to be what translators lack. The narrator
defines good writing thus: “To write well is to make continual incursions into grammar,
into established usage, and into accepted linguistic norms. It is an act of permanent
rebellion.”
For Ortega y Gasset, true opinion, which in his work has no finite, attainable,
counterpart in firm knowledge, is set in opposition to public opinion. Given that true
opinion is as close as one can get to Truth and squarely stands in opposition to the
public, hence wrong opinion, it acts as a key when the narrator, in the last few words in
the dialogue, agrees with the linguist that his style of translation is just what the public
wishes. It puts the linguist’s suggestion of a style of translation that is “ugly, as science
has always been” rather squarely in the wrong camp.
In summary, Liberal Education shows us where we stand by showing us to be in
relation. By assuming connections across time and across fields , it encourages us to
look for those relations rather taking things at face value. Because we do not settle on a
face value reading, we are nudged to look more, to keep looking, yielding a more a
6
M 81e. p. 14
�7
nuanced picture. In order to wish to look beyond what is simply at hand, an
understanding that we do not already know all there is to know is necessary –and that
grows out of seeing ourselves in relation. Effort is always laced with courage as it
means moving away the pool of general, unreflective thought and the gesturing toward
authorities for confirmation; it brings one rather to stand on one’s own feet.
To me “The Misery and Splendor of Translation” looks like a brave and humble attempt
which allow us to “transmigrate” into the mind Plato, at the same time as being much
more than just that. It is anything but secondary literature.
�
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In the middle of a conversation : reflections on Ortega y Gasset's "The misery and splendor of translation"
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Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Kathleen Longwaters at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus
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Servile Spartans: The problems of liberal education in Aristotle’s Politics
Presented at What is Liberal Education For?
St. John’s College (Santa Fe), October 18, 2014
Thornton Lockwood
Quinnipiac University
ABSTRACT: In the last two books of the Politics, Aristotle articulates a vision of education for his
best regime in contrast to what he takes to be the goal and practices of the educational system
of Sparta’s famous agôgê. Although Aristotle never refers to his program as liberal education,
clearly he takes its goal to be the production of free citizens (hoi eleutheroi), which includes
both males and females in his best regime. By contrast, in several places Aristotle characterizes
the results of the Spartan system as “crude” (phortikos), “slavish” (andrapodôdes), and “servile”
(banauson). I argue that Aristotle’s criticism of Spartan education both elucidates his general
understanding of Sparta but also serves as a foil which can elucidate his own notion of liberal
education. Further, I argue that Aristotle’s characterization of Spartan education as “slavish”
and “servile” calls into question the claim that his notion of what is banausic is simply an
expression of class prejudice. I conclude the paper by identifying some inconsistencies
between liberal education in the Politics and elsewhere in Aristotle’s corpus.
KEYWORDS: Aristotle, Politics, Sparta, liberal education, freedom
Although there are places in Aristotle’s writings where he is appreciative of Spartan
social and political institutions, his account of their famed educational system—the agôgê
which Xenophon and Plutarch lavish with praise—is not one of them.1 Within the space of a
half-dozen chapters in the last two books of the Politics, Aristotle describes the aims and results
of the Spartan education system as “crude” (phortikos), “slavish” (andrapodôdes), and “servile”
1
See Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus (Lyc.), 14.1-3, 16-24 and Xenophon, Constitution of the
Lacedaemonians (Lak. Pol.), 2-5. Pol 7.14.1333b11-12 (husteron tines) may be a reference to
Xenophon. Unless otherwise noted, parenthetical references within my paper refer to book,
chapter, and Bekker page numbers of the Politics. Translations are my own, based on Ross
1957 but are significantly informed by the translations of Reeve 1998 and Kraut 1997. In several
places I have drawn upon passages from two of my previously unpublished papers, “Double
Standards? Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Republic and the Spartan Constitution” and “Is there a
Poetics in Aristotle’s Politics?”
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(banauson), terms one usually associates in Aristotle’s writings with manual laborers or slaves
rather than the virtuous elite of an aristocratic regime.2 Although Aristotle praises Sparta as
one of the first and only cities to take seriously the problem of educating its citizens in a
communal setting (something very rare throughout the archaic and classical periods), he thinks
both the goals of that education and the means by which those goals were implemented were
deeply and historically flawed.3 Examining Aristotle’s critique of Spartan education elucidates
our understanding of its institutions and rounds out Aristotle’s own position on one of the most
controversial societies ever.4
Aristotle uses Sparta as a foil to elucidate his own account of the kind of virtue which
education should produce in his account of the “city of one’s prayers” in the last two books of
the Politics. Aristotle underscores repeatedly that such a form of education aims at producing
“free persons” (hoi eleutheroi). An examination of his criticisms of Spartan education is thus
2
Pol 7.14.1333b8-10, 7.15.1334a38-40, 8.4.1338b25-39. What Aristotle means by the term
banauson, I will argue, is a matter of dispute. Most English translators (e.g., Reeve 1998, Kraut
1997, Lord 2013, Barker 1958) use the term “vulgar” to render the term in English (Simpson
1997 uses “vulgar mechanic”). I will translate the term consistently as “servile” and examine it
at length in part II of my paper.
3
Whereas Xenophon blames Sparta’s decline in the 4th century on departures from the
constitution of Lycurgus, Aristotle traces the problems all the way back to the Spartan
Constitution’s quasi-mythical founder. See Lak. Pol. 14; cf. Pol 2.9.1270a6-8, 1271a2, 1271a41,
7.14.1333b24-25.
4
Aristotle devotes a chapter to the criticisms of Sparta in his review of purportedly best
constitutions in Politics 2.9; Politics 7.2, 7.14, 7.15 critique Sparta’s aim of domination (kratein)
and the effects that aim has on its educational system; and Politics 8.4 and 8.5 critique Spartan
physical and musical education. Although De Laix 1974, George 1982, Schütrumpf 1994, and
Rubin 2012 focus on Aristotle’s criticism in Pol 2.9 (especially the question of whether
Aristotle’s criticisms distinguish between Lycurgan Sparta and the Sparta of his own time), there
is no comprehensive recent account of Aristotle’s political, social, and educational critiques of
Sparta.
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also an excellent way to unpack what Aristotle intends by the notion of a free or liberal person,
the corresponding notion of a free person’s or liberal education.5 Although some have argued
that Aristotle’s notion of liberal education is perniciously elitist—and dare I say, the bad sort of
elitism predicated solely on socio-economic status—I will argue that the problems Aristotle
finds with Spartan education transcend class-based elitism precisely because they are aimed at
the upper classes of an oligarchic society.6 No doubt, Aristotle is hardly an egalitarian. But
when Aristotle claims that Spartan education produces individuals who are “banausic” or
servile in the true sense of the term (8.4.1338b34), his criticism transcends a class-based
disdain for manual or wage labor.7
To make that case that Aristotle’s notion of liberal education is more than just an elitist
prejudice, I first articulate Aristotle’s understanding and major criticisms of Spartan education.
Since Aristotle claims that Spartan education produces servile citizens, the second part of my
paper analyzes the notion of servility (banauson) in the Politics more generally. In the third part
5
Aristotle draws distinctions between eleutheros (a free person), eleutherios (what is
characteristic of a free person) and the character trait of eleutheriotês; further he draws
distinctions within each use of the term. Nonetheless, in my paper I will use the phrase a “free
person” (and its cognates) in place of all three terms for convenience of exposition. For a
detailed discussion of the terms eleutheria and eleutheros, see Hansen 2010; for that of
eleutheriotês, see Hare 1988.
6
See further Nightingale 1996 and Nightingale 2001.
7
Aristotle’s claim that Spartan education is banausic is especially sharp given Spartan disdain
for and apparent prohibitions against the practice of artesian trades in Sparta. Aristotle points
out that the Spartan habit of wearing long hair is the mark of a free man, since the performance
of servile tasks (ergon thêtikon) is difficult for one so adorned (Rhetoric 1.9.1367a28-33).
Herodotus reports that 5th C. Spartans were most contemptuous of the manual crafts (Hist.
2.167); Xenophon and Aristotle imply, and Plutarch reports, that the Lycurgan constitution
forbade Spartans from participating in the arts and money-making (Lak. Pol. 7.1-6, cf. 13.5,
14.1-3; Pol 3.6.1278a18-20; Lyc. 9.3-5, 24.2). See further Cartledge 1976.
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of my paper, I articulate Aristotle’s notions of both a free person and the nature of education in
the best regime in order to arrive at what I would characterize as his notion of liberal
education. Although my argument rebuts the claim that Aristotle’s notion of liberal education
is perniciously elitist, the fourth and final part of my paper identifies tensions between the
account of liberal education in the Politics and how education is usually construed in the
Nicomachean Ethics.
Part I: The problematic goal and practices of Spartan education
Aristotle’s general evaluation of Spartan education is that although their legislator
deserves praise for taking seriously the ethical formation of its citizens—what Aristotle calls
paideia—both the aims and the execution of Spartan paideia are deeply flawed. 4th century
education in the polis world was generally a “private” matter, namely one conducted within
one’s own household—with hired tutors or educators in the case of wealthy families—which
was organized around literacy (both reading and writing), physical or gymnastic training, and
music.8 Spartan education was thus unusual in being a public, communal matter—which is a
major source of Aristotle’s praise.9 Nonetheless, the bulk of his criticism is negative. First and
foremost, Spartan education is fundamentally misdirected towards the goal of domination and
the inculcation of solely martial virtues such as courage and endurance. But further, he is also
8
EN 10.9.1179b30-1180b16, Pol 8.3.1337b21-33. See further Marrou 1956: 14-25, 36-45,
Cartledge 2001a, Kennel 1995, and Ducat 2006.
9
A point Aristotle makes repeatedly: EN 10.9.1180a25-29, Pol 7.2.1324b5-9, 8.1.1337a30-32; it
is also a point which he inherits most immediately from Plato’s Laws (ref.).
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explicitly critical of the practices of Sparta’s gymnastic and musical education10 and its apparent
neglect of female education.11
On Aristotle’s reading, the aim of the Spartan constitution is military domination
(kratein [2.9.1271b3, 7.2.1324b7, 7.14.1333b14, b30]) and the quality which it sought to
inculcate in support of that aim is the martial virtue of endurance (karteria [2.9.1269b20,
7.15.1334a22]).12 Aristotle is critical of both the Spartan aim and its elevation of endurance as
the highest virtue. With respect to the Spartan aim of domination: in Politics 7.14 Aristotle
reasons from the claim that happiness is the aim of the best constitution to the claims that
work (ascholia) is pursued for the sake of leisure (scholê) and that war is pursued for the sake of
peace (1333a30-b5). To elucidate his point, he considers the case of “those Greeks who are
currently held (dokountes) to be best governed,” namely the Spartans, whose constitution aims
at conquest and war (7.14.1333b5-6). Aristotle characterizes such an aim as “crude” (phortikôs
[1333b9]) and more conducive to acquisition (pleonektikôteras [1333b10]). Those who praise
10
Aristotle makes no reference to Spartan education concerning literacy, quite possibly
because it was neglected in Spartan education. See Cartledge 2001b.
11
Pol 2.9.1269b12 ff. The accuracy of Aristotle’s remarks about Spartan women is a source of
disagreement. Plutarch contested the accuracy of Aristotle’s remarks about the education of
Spartan women (Lyc., 26.2-30). Amongst modern scholars, one end of the spectrum is
Cartledge’s claim that Aristotle’s remarks are the “map and compass” on the subject (2001c, p.
86). At the other end is Pomeroy’s claim that for Aristotle, household hierarchy “existed by
nature and any perversion of it was monstrous. That Spartan women enjoyed authority in the
oikos and owned and managed property appeared to him outrageous” (2002, p. 151).
12
In several places, Aristotle invokes the distinction between the “fundamental principle”
(hypothesis) or “aim” (skopos, telos) of a constitution and the fit between such an aim and the
constitution’s institutions. Pol 2.9.1269b30-34, 7.13.1331b25-32a8. For example, one can
examine whether democracies are correct to make freedom the ordering principle of their
societies but one can also examine whether a specific social or political institution is consistent
with the democratic principle. I elaborate on this point in “Double Standards? Aristotle’s
critique of Plato’s Republic and the Spartan Constitution.”
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such a constitution fail to see both that in the 4th century Sparta underwent a serious
decline13—which made them “not a happy people” (1334a22-23)—and that there is nothing
especially fine in despotically ruling over other people. Rather, according to Aristotle it is ruling
a free people—namely, by incorporating ruling and being ruled amongst the citizenry—that is
fine or noble.
With respect to the Spartan elevation of endurance as the highest virtue: in Politics 7.15
Aristotle discusses those virtues which education ought to inculcate and again turns to Sparta
as a foil for his own educational program. Since the human end consists in the excellent
exercise of leisure, Aristotle claims that education should inculcate those virtues useful for
leisure—both those activated during leisurely pursuit (diagôgê) and those involved in the work
(ascholia) to secure leisure (scholê). Thus, he writes that
Courage and endurance (karteria) are required for work (ascholia), philosophy
for leisure (scholê), and moderation for both, but particularly for peace and
leisure. For war compels people to be just and moderate, but the enjoyment of
good luck and the leisure that accompanies peace tends to make them arrogant.
Much justice and moderation are needed, therefore, by those who are held to
be doing best (tous arista dokountas [1334a29])…For they will be most in need
of philosophy, moderation, and justice the more they live at leisure amidst an
abundance of such goods. (7.15.1334a22-29, 31-34)
13
See further Cawkwall 1983.
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Although Aristotle certainly recognizes a place for the martial virtues of endurance and courage
in his own account of education in the best regime, both virtues are oriented towards what he
calls “necessity” rather than what is leisurely (7.15.1334a18). Sparta’s elevation of endurance
as the highest virtue leaves them incapacitated to exercise the virtues of leisure and peace.14 It
is especially shameful (aischron) to be unable to make use of goods at leisure. Sparta is in the
predicament of having its men appear to be good men when working (ascholountas) and
fighting but as slaves (andrapodôdeis) when at peace and being at leisure (scholazontas)
(1334a36-40).
Even if one grants that domination is the rightful goal of a polis and endurance the
highest virtue, Aristotle believes that the practices which Sparta uses (or fails to use) to
inculcate such a world view are deeply flawed. First, Aristotle claims that “the legislator, 15
wishing the whole city-state to have endurance (karterikên), makes his wish evident where the
men are concerned, but has been negligent in the case of women. For being free from all
constraint, the live in total intemperance and luxury” (2.9.1269b13-14, 19-23). Such neglect
resulted in female licentiousness (anesis) which is detrimental to the “deliberately chosen aims
14
As Aristotle puts it in another context, “Like an iron sword, [the Spartans] lose their edge
when they remain at peace” (7.14.1334a8-9).
15
In Politics 2.9, Aristotle makes reference to Lycurgus, Sparta’s apocryphal founder, and “the
legislator” (for the use of the name “Lycurgus,” which is found usually outside Politics 2.9, see:
2.9.1270a7, 2.10.1271b25, 2.12.1273b33, 2.12.1274a29, 4.11.1296a20; for the use of the term
“legislator,” which is ubiquitous inside 2.9, see: 2.9.1269b20, 1270a4, 1270b1, b19, 1271a13,
a22, a41, 1271b15). De Laix suggests that Aristotle uses the name of Lycurgus when he praises
Sparta and “the legislator” when he criticizes him (De Laix, 1974: xx).
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of the constitution” (tên proairesin tês politeias).16 Lycurgus elevated a certain virile strength or
military virtue above all other virtues, since such excellence makes domination possible.17
Female licentiousness undermines or is at odds with such a hypothesis in at least two ways.
First, licentiousness inculcates intemperance and luxury in Spartan women, which in turn
infects Spartan men with esteem for wealth or love of money (1269b24; cf, 1270a14-15,
1271a18).18 Second, the sexual obsession which warlike Spartan men have—as the pairing of
Aphrodite and Ares in myth reminds us (1269b28-29)—empowers Spartan women to rule
Sparta as gunaikokratoumenoi (1269b24-25).19 Aristotle notes,
What difference is there between women rulers and rulers ruled by women? The
result is the same. Audacity (thrasutêtos) is not useful in everyday matters, but
only, if at all, in war. Yet Spartan women were very harmful even here. They
showed this quite clearly during the Theban invasions [in 371].” (2.9.1269b3236).
16
Aristotle refers to the “choice” of the legislator or the “aim” (boulêmati [2.9.1270b32]) of the
constitution in a way that is equivalent to his use of the term hypothesis. See 2.9.1269b13-14,
1271a32, 2.12.1274a12.
17
See 2.9.1271b1-7; cf. Lyc. 22.2 and Lac. Pol. 14.1-7.
18
For a survey of classical attitudes towards Spartan views about wealth, see S. Hodkinson
1994, which groups Plato and Aristotle together as critics who claim that Sparta’s covert love of
money was deeply rooted in Lycurgan or traditional Spartan institutions—such as the neglect of
women—rather than the result of the imperial successes following the Peloponnesian wars
(201-207). Schütrumpf 1994 concurs, arguing against those who see Aristotle distinguishing
between praiseworthy aspects of Sparta “in the good old days” and blameworthy aspects of
Sparta in its 4th century decline.
19
For examples of testimony concerning Spartan women that support Aristotle’s claims, see
Bradford 1986. He concludes that “We—in the light of modern feminism—might not agree that
Spartan women ruled Spartan men, but we must concede to Aristotle that some Spartan
women did have real power in the Spartan state” (18).
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Neglect of female education is at the heart of Sparta’s demise. Aristotle makes clear in the
Politics that the education of half of the free population is an integral part of a constitution’s
educational program (1.13.1260b13-20).
Secondly, Aristotle criticizes the practice of Spartan musical education.20 In Politics 8.5
Aristotle takes up the question of whether musical education includes a performative element,
and he casts the question in terms of a debate between Spartan musical education and that
which Aristotle himself will ultimately advocate. In his dialectical consideration of whether and
how one should participate in music, Aristotle notes that even if music is able to improve
people’s character (ta êthê [1339a41])
Why should [children] learn [to perform music] themselves, rather than being
like the Spartans, who enjoy the music of others in the right way and are able to
judge it (dunasthai krinein [1339b1])? For the Spartans do not learn it
themselves, but are still able, so they say (hos phasi [1339b3]), to judge rightly
(krinein orthôs [1339b3]) which melodies are good and which are not.
(8.5.1339a41-39b4)
Politics 8.6 make clear that Aristotle does not endorse this endoxon concerning Spartan
abilities. Instead, he claims “It is not difficult to see, of course, that if someone takes part in
performance himself, it makes a great difference in the development of certain qualities, since
20
Although Aristotle does not mention it explicitly, I believe he would endorse Cartledge’s claim
that “it took the Spartans to transform the joyous social activity of dancing into a paradeground endurance test, as they did in the annual festival of the Gymnopaidiai” (Cartledge
2001a: 86). For a survey of the surviving testimony of what Plato in the Laws characterizes as a
test of endurance during strong heat (633c), see Pettersson 1992: 42-56.
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it is difficult if not impossible to become excellent judges of performance (tôn ergôn kritas
genesthai spoudaious [1340b25]) if they do not take part in it” (8.6.1340b22-25). Proper
judgment of music requires some familiarity with the performance of music, and proper
performance trains one to listen not only critically for musical education, but for education of
any sort (8.6.1341a19-21). Although some—perhaps including the Spartans21—disdain
performing music as inherently crude or servile, Aristotle rejects that position in Politics 8.6-7
(which I will return to in Part III of the paper).
Finally, In Politics 8.4 Aristotle claims that Sparta’s gymnastic education—which aims at
producing animal ferocity (thêriôdes [8.4.1338b12-13, 29]) rather than courage based in a sense
of what is kalon or noble22—produces inferior combatants. In Aristotle’s eyes, it appears that
the Spartan legislator thought that compelling youth to confront hardships or danger would
train them to be brave in the face of battle (citations). But as we know from Aristotle’s own
account of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics, animal ferocity is at best a weak approximation
of real courage; it lacks any sense of what is fine or noble, which is the fundamental orientation
of true courage.23 Aristotle also faults the Spartan “devotion to rigorous exertion” (philoponia
21
Aristotle leaves the identity of the objectors unknown: see tous phaskontas (1340b34) and
tines (b40).
22
Anecdotes about the brutality of Spartan gymnastic education are legion, but perhaps that of
the “hidden fox” is most indicative. Plutarch tells the story of a Spartan boy—encouraged to
steal to feed himself (which the Spartan agôgê did generally to teach children cunning)—who
carried around concealed under his cloak a young fox which he had stolen. The boy “suffered
the animal to tear out his bowels with its teeth and claws, and died rather than have his theft
detected” (Lyc. 18.1).
23
Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 3.8 claims that thumotic or natural courage resembles that of
beasts (ta thêria) but lacks the notion of what is fine (to kalon), which Aristotle thinks is a
defining element of true courage (EN 3.8.1116b23-1117a9; cf. EN 3.7.1115b11-13).
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[1338b25]) which he thinks, in light of the Spartan military defeats in the 4 th century (such as at
Leuctra in 371 and Mantinea in 362 BCE), was inferior to the gymnastic training of other cities.
Spartan rigorous physical education produces people who are “truly servile (banausous…kata
ge to alêthes). For they make them useful to statesmen for one task only, and one at which
they are worse than other people” (8.4.1339b32-35). Determining what Aristotle means by
calling such men banausic “in accord with the truth” requires a digression into the meaning of
the term in Aristotle’s Politics.
Part II: Servility (to banauson) in Aristotle’s Politics
The claim that Spartan physical education produces “truly servile” men picks up on a
theme running through many of Aristotle’s criticisms of Sparta and points towards the
elucidation of what he also means by a free person’s education. Aristotle characterizes what is
“banauson” or what I have chosen to translate as “servile” in several places.24 Certainly one
sense of the term derives from the class of artisans to which the term banausos applies, namely
those manual workers whom Aristotle thinks are a necessary part of any city, but whom he
denies citizenship to generally, and especially in his best regime. In Politics 1.11, Aristotle
identifies one class of wage-earners as “servile craftsmen” (tôn banausôn technitôn) who are
distinct from unskilled labor; he goes on to say that they are more servile the more they
damage their bodies (1258b25-29, 37-38). Aristotle claims that such artisans are an integral
24
In what follows, I focus upon Aristotle’s use of the term in the Politics. But it is worth bearing
in mind that Aristotle in the EN also identifies the man who is the excess of the mean of
megaloprepeia as ho banausos, who is described as one who spends lavishly at inappropriate
times (the EE claims that there is no name for such a person). See further EN 4.2, EE 3.6.
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part of the dêmos (4.3.1289b33-35, 4.4.1291a1-4) and make up the majority of citizens in
democracies (6.1.1317a25, 6.4.1319a26-31). Nonetheless, he explicitly excludes them in his
best regime (3.5.1277b33-78a25, 7.9.1328b39-29a3, 1329a20). Seizing upon such passages,
Nightingale claims that
In the most general terms, “banausoi” is the label for people who earn a living
plying a trade or craft that involves the use of the hands. The word ‘artisan’ (in
the broadest sense) is more accurate than ‘mechanic,’ though even this term is
too limited. It is important to emphasize that the term banausos generally
carries a pejorative sense, since it marks a person as mercantile and servile. In
fact, the term is virtually monopolized by aristocratic writers, and it therefore
carries with it the perspective and prejudices of the leisured class. (Nightingale
2001, p. 134; see also Nightingale 1996.)
Certainly the term banauson picks out people identifiable by their relationship to a certain
mode of production.
But when Aristotle invokes the “true” sense of banauson in his critique of Spartan
physical education in Politics 8.4, it seems far more plausible to elucidate the term by means of
his discussion of it in Politics 8.2. In order to distinguish between liberal and illiberal education,
Aristotle stipulates that
Any task, craft, or branch of learning should be considered servile (banauson) if it
renders the body or mind of free people useless for the practices and activities
of virtue. That is why (dio) the crafts that put the body into a worse condition
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and work done for wages are called servile; for they debase the mind and
deprive it of leisure. (8.2.1337b8-11)
The claim that Aristotle’s class prejudices bias his account of liberal education gets the cart
before the horse. No doubt, wage labor that stunts one’s body or mind is banausic, but the
reason is because it stunts the mind or body, not because it is based on wages.25 Certainly in
Aristotle’s economic world, wage labor was a stultifying and feeble existence.26 But servility is
not defined, as it were, in relationship to one’s labor. Rather, in Politics 8.2 servility is defined
in terms of the effects of a practice upon an individual, which provides the explanation for why
wage labor is called banausic. Spartan education also incapacities the mind and body for the
exercise of virtue, but that education has nothing to do with wage labor.
Aristotle’s contrast between liberal (eleutheron) or “free” leisure activity and what is
illiberal (aneleutheron) further undermines defining servility by relationship to a sort of labor.27
Aristotle characterizes illiberality according to the reason why someone performs an action
rather than on the basis of the action itself. For instance, in his discussion of how citizens in his
best regime will learn to rule and be ruled, Aristotle notes that
25
As Stalley notes, “If we are to retrieve anything from Aristotle’s philosophy of education we
need to challenge his pessimistic view of the occupations he calls ‘banausic’…Aristotle believes
that, because certain occupations distort the character in ways which prevent people from
living a truly good ife, those who follow those occupations cannot be citizens. We might reply
that the cause of corruption is not the occupations themselves so much as their social context
and the attitudes with which they are undertaken” (Stalley 2009: 575). My central argument is
that Aristotle’s criticism of Sparta shows that this is not only “our” reply but his own.
26
At Politics I.13.1260a38-1260b1, Aristotle compares—unfavorable—the effects of wage labor
and those of slavery. For the economic status of wage labors in antiquity, see Nagle xxxx: xxxxxx.
27
Aristotle seems to use banauson and aneleutheron interchangeably in Politics 7-8. [SUPPLY
EVIDENCE.]
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some commands differ not with respect to the tasks they assign but with respect
to that for the sake of which they are done. That is why it is noble even for free
young men to perform many of the tasks that are held to be appropriate for
slaves. For the difference between noble and shameful actions does not lie so
much in the acts themselves as in their ends, on that for the sake of which they
are performed. (7.14.1333a6-10)
Learning how to be ruled requires learning how to obey commands for the right reasons and
education needs to prepare one to distinguish those reasons. Another passage later in Politics
8 articulates the same distinction more specifically. In seeking to classify what is liberal,
Aristotle notes that “the sake for which one acts or learns also makes a big difference. For what
one does for one’s own sake, for the sake of friends, or on account of virtue is not illiberal, but
someone who does the same thing for others would often be held to be acting like a hired
laborer or slave (thêtikon kai doulikon)” (Pol 8.2.1337b17-20). To use an example which
Aristotle will provides subsequently: there is nothing intrinsically illiberal about performing
music. But if one performs that music pandering to the boorish pleasure of an audience or for
the sake of money rather than to develop virtue, then the musical performance is illiberal or
servile (8.6.1341b8-18).
Returning to Aristotle’s critique of Spartan education, we can see what Aristotle thinks is
its central flaw. “The principle which determines all the rest” in the case of education is the
ability to make fine use of leisurely activities (8.3.1337b31-32). Spartan education fails to
inculcate such an ability. The Spartan constitution’s aim at domination is crude and acquisitive.
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Its elevation of endurance over other virtues produces citizens no different from slaves with
respect to the activities of leisure. Its neglect of female education permits money-loving
tendencies to grow amongst its people. Its musical education produces men incapable of
judging what is fine. And its physical education produces mediocre combatants who are
banausically unable to do anything except fight. The Spartan educational program seems to be
the opposite of a liberal education.
Part III: Aristotle’s notion of liberal education
Reconstructing Aristotle’s notion of liberal education faces a challenge.28 Although he
discusses in numerous places both what it means to be either “liberal” (either eleutheros—
literally, a free man, or eleutherios, what is characteristic of a free person) or illiberal
(aneleutheros) and the nature of paideia, or education, he never analyzes the notion of “liberal
education” per se. Rather, what we find in his writings are the characterization of a free
person’s science, rhythms, laughter, pleasures, bodily exercise, and even agora and the nature
of a free person as such.29 Aristotle also distinguishes between curricular aspects of the main
division of education, namely reading/writing, gymnastics, drawing, and music. In order to
reconstruct the core characteristics of what we can call Aristotle’s “notion of liberal education,”
28
For other reconstructions of Aristotle’s educational program, see Lord 1982, Reeve 1998, and
Stalley 2009.
29
See, for instance, science (8.2.1337b15), rhythms (8.5.1340b10), laughter (EN 4.8.1128a20),
pleasures (EN 3.11.1118b5, 8.6.1158a21), bodily exercise (7.16.1335b11), and agora
(7.12.1331a32).
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I will first look at what he says is characteristic of a free person and then relate it to what he
says about the various subdivisions of education.
At first glance, one thinks of a free person in political terms—as one who participates as
a citizen within a political community.30 Aristotle’s term eleutheros is cognate with the term
eleutheria or “freedom” which is both a defining characteristic of a democracy and the nativeborn status which grounds a claim to share in the political process of a democratic
constitution.31 Clearly the notion of a free person has important political significance, for
Aristotle points out in numerous places that what he calls “political rule”—namely, the
reciprocal rule in which rulers and the ruled take turns ruling—can only be exercised over
people who are free.32 Furthermore, Aristotle explicitly notes that the educational program in
30
Hansen notes that the “oldest” and “most common” meaning of eleutheros is “being free” in
opposition to “being a slave” (Hansen 2010: 2) and argues that “we must free ourselves of the
anachronistic conviction that a political philosopher must have a positive conception of political
freedom and that, consequently, Plato and Aristotle must have developed their own notions of
eleutheria in order to replace or at least modify the democrats’ erroneous understanding of the
concept” (Hansen 2010: 26). Aristotle uses the notion of eleutheros (a free man) primarily in the
sense of what I will call one who is “ordered and measured”; by contrast, he uses the term
eleutherios in two distinct senses, viz. in the general sense of one who is ordered or measured,
but also in the narrow sense of one who possesses the character trait of eleutheriotês, namely
one who is “generous” or observes the mean between wastefulness (asôtia) and illiberality
(aneleutheria) with respect to the use of money (which is analyzed in EN 4.1, EE 3.4, and MM
24). For possible interrelations between the general and narrow senses of the term “liberality,”
see Hare 1988.
31
For eleutheria as the “hypothesis” or horos of democracy, see 4.8.1294a11-20, 6.2.1317a40,
4.12.1296b18; for the term as native-born status as ground for participating in the constitution,
see 3.8.1280a5, 3.9.1280124, 3.9.1281a6, 3.1283a6, 3.13.1283b20.
32
1.7.1255b22, 3.4.1277b8-17, 3.17.1288a11, 7.14.133a6, b18; cf. EN 5.6.1134a27. See further
Mayhew 2009. Hansen claims that “Neither in the Eudemian nor in the Nicomachean Ethics is
there any discussion whatsoever of the free person or the concept of freedom….Nor does
Aristotle in the Politics betray any serious interest in the concept of political freedom” (Hansen
2010: 10, 11). Hansen’s argument is partially that Aristotle’s discussion of “liberality” is
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his best regime is designed to prepare its citizens to exercise such political rule—or be capable
of ruling and being ruled (7.14.1332b12 ff.). But as Aristotle also points out, defining who is
free in terms of civic participation is questionable since there are “free men” in some cities
whom Aristotle would deny a claim of participation in his best regime. As Aristotle notes in his
discussion of citizenship,
The best city-state will not confer citizenship on the servile (banauson [1278a8]),
however; but if they too are citizens, then what we have characterized as a
citizen’s virtue cannot be ascribed to everyone, or even to free people, but only
to those who are freed from necessary tasks (tôn ergôn…tôn anagkaiôn).
(3.5.1278a8-11)
Aristotle clearly (and rather unapologetically) maintains both that manual, agrarian, and wage
workers are necessary for the best constitution and that they are not fit to be full citizens—or
free men—because of their inability to exercise virtue.33 That some free men have political
status in other constitutions means that political status per se cannot be a sufficient condition
or characteristic to determine a free person.
delimited to its sense of the virtue concerned with generosity, and partially that Aristotle thinks
of freedom primarily in the sense of leisurely activity (in opposition to what is slavish).
Although it goes beyond the limits of my paper to make the argument, I take Aristotle’s claim
that freedom is a necessary condition of political rule as grounding his “political” notion of
freedom; Aristotle’s claim that the paideia of his best regime is supposed to prepare its citizens
for ruling and being ruled (7.14.1332b12 ff) certainly suggests that the “liberal” component of
liberal education is directed towards the political use of freedom in self-government in addition
to the proper use of leisure. Thus, my position is much closer to Liddel 2007: 323-331 and Kraut
2002: 452-453.
33
7.7.1327b28, 7.9.1329a26, 7.10.1330a26-33.
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In places Aristotle will describe “people who are by nature free” in juxtaposition with
one who is “a slave by nature” (1.5.1255a1; 7.3.1325a28-30). The latter is described as
someone who “despite being human, is by nature not his own (ho gar mê hautou) but someone
else’s.”34 In the Metaphysics, in his discussion of “a free man’s science,” Aristotle will also
characterize the free person as one who “exists for his own sake and not for the sake of
someone else” (Meta 1.2.982b25-26). Later in that work, in an analogy to explain how the
cosmos manifests goodness, he writes that
All things are ordered in relation to one thing. It is as in a household, in which
the freemen are least at liberty (hekista exestin) to act at random but all or most
things are ordered, while slaves and wild animals contribute little to the common
good but for the most part act at random; for such is the principle of each of
these, which is their nature. (Meta 12.10.1075a18-23, Apostle trans.)
As Apostle notes in his commentary on the passage, what Aristotle seems to have in mind is
that as the head of the household is to God, so too are free wife and sons to other movers and
celestial bodies, and slaves and animals are to destructible bodies in the sub-lunar sphere.35
Being “one’s own” or “existing for one’s own sake” is the opposite of the democratic
interpretation of freedom, which views eleutheria as doing whatever one wants with no sense
of authority or rule.36 Rather, the truly free person exhibits an ordered, measured quality.37
34
1.4.1254a14-15; cf. 1.5.1254b20-23, EN 10.6.1177a8.
Apostle 1966: 407 n. 4.
36
See 5.9.1310a30, 6.2.1317a40 ff.
37
Aristotle distinguishes the dancing movements which some rhythms produce as more free
from those movements which are more “crude” (phortikôteras [1340b9-10]); the former
35
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The civic nature of such “measured” freedom, paradoxically, is best elucidated by
Aristotle’s remarks about the play (paidia) appropriate to a free person in his discussion of the
virtue of wit (eutrapelia) or its mean-state of dexterity, tact, or ingenuity (epidexiotês). As I will
discuss below, one of the most striking restrictions in Aristotle’s liberal education is its
limitation on “shameful speech” (aischrologia) for all citizens (not just the young [7.17.1336b35]).38 In the Ethics, Aristotle claims that it is characteristic
of a person who is dexterous to say and to listen to the sorts of things that are fitting for
those who are decent and free (tô(i) epieikei kai eleutheriô(i)). For there are some things
that it is appropriate for such a person to say as part of amusement (paidias), and also
to listen to, and the amusement of the free person (hê tou eleutheriou paidia) differs
from that of a slavish person (tês tou andrapodôdous), and that of the well-educated
from that of the uneducated one. We can also see this from old and new comedies,
since in the former what caused laugher was obscenity (aischrologia), whereas in the
latter it is more innuendo (hyponoia), and there is no small difference between these as
regards graciousness (euschêmosunên). Should a person who jibes well (eu skôptonta)
be defined then as saying things that are not unsuitable for a free person or that do not
cause pain to his listener or even delight him?...Now he will not produce every sort. For
jibes are a type of abuse (loidorêma), and some types of abuse are forbidden by
legislators, so presumably should some types of jibing. A sophisticated (charieis) and
free person, then, will be like that, since he is a sort of law for himself (hoion nomos ôn
heautô(i)). (EN 4.8.1128a16-27, 29-32)
Although Aristotle contrasts the witty person with the buffoon (phortikos) or the slavish person
who finds a joke in everything, his preference for “new” over “old” comedy indicates that the
joking in question is decidedly critical and indeed even caustic, like the jibes which Aristophanes
appear to be like Dorian harmonies, namely those which are measured and composed (mesôs
kai kathestêkotôs [1340b3]).
38
For the legal/political context of Aristotle’s remarks, see Kraut 1997: 161-165 and Collins
2006: 154-165.
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regularly makes against politicians of his time such as Kleon.39 Indeed, although the speech in
question is actually legislated in Aristotle’s time, his claim that the witty or free person is like a
“law” (nomos) for himself further underscores that the freedom in question is a sort of positive
freedom or autonomy which makes it possible for him to participate in a free person’s
amusement.40 Play is a form of leisurely activity, and the free person is precisely the one who
knows how to play excellently.
Aristotle’s notion of the free person thus seems to include at least three notions. First,
the free person is one who possesses the ability to participate in civic affairs both as one who
rules and as one who is ruled. Secondly, it is first and foremost the orderly and measured way
that such a person acts—sensitive to the particularities and context of what he or she does or
says—which sets that person apart from those who are unfree. Finally, to say that such a
person “exists for his own sake” seems to imply a sort of autonomy or positive freedom such
that that person’s actions are constitutive of what it means to act well or finely. If the free
person exhibits such characteristics, how does Aristotle’s liberal education produce such a
person?
Aristotle’s criticisms of Spartan education elucidates such a question because he uses
Sparta both as foil to his own proposals and as a model from which to borrow. As already
39
In the Rhetoric Aristotle characterizes wittiness as “hubris that has been educated” (Rhet
2.12.1389b11-12).For the notion that pandering to the audience epitomizes what is phortikos,
see 8.6.1341b16, 8.7.1342a20; cf. Poet 26.1461b29, 1462a4; Rhet 3.1.1395b1, 1404a1.
40
Assuming that the free person is the same as the decent person (ho spoudaios), then such a
person is further the measure or canon for the exercise of virtue because he judges (krinei)
each thing correctly, especially concerning what is pleasant or fine (EN 3.4.1113a29-b2; cf.
10.5.1176a16-23, 10.6.1176b26-30).
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noted, Aristotle incorporates the public and communal aspects of Spartan education into his
own account (8.1.1337a31-32).41 But further, like the Spartan legislator, Aristotle designs a
comprehensive program of education that begins with eugenic breeding guidelines for
parents—to insure the production of babies with the proper bodily compositions—and then
proceeds with habituation and education according to different age-classes that stretch from
birth at least through the age of 21.42 (An Appendix to my paper provides a schematic overview
of Aristotle’s age-classes.) Aristotle’s program focuses upon three different aspects of human
development: development of the body, habituation of the nonrational parts of the soul, and
education of the rational part of the soul (7.15.34b12-28; cf. 8.3.1338b3-7). Aristotle also
organized his educational program into three age-classes (not including the pre-natal guidelines
for parents to insure proper bodies for babies described in Pol 7.16): from the moment of birth
through the age of seven, from age seven through puberty, and from puberty through the age
of twenty-one. It appears that the three aspects of development do not correspond with the
three age-classes: The first age class includes guidelines for bodily growth, the development of
habits, and the observation of lessons (mathêsis), and the last age class includes both lessons
(mathêmata) and rigorous gymnastic training.43 Let me elucidate how physical education,
41
Other apparent mimicry of Spartan institutions include habituating children against cold (see
7.17.1336a15-21 with Lak. Pol. 2.4) and establishing a paidonomos or supervisor of children
(see 7.17.1336b31-32 with Lak. Pol. 2.2, 2.10, 4.6).
42
There are some hints that Aristotle envisions civic education to extend into adulthood in the
best regime; it certainly includes guidelines about the sexual activities of mature adults
(7.16.1335b35-40). See further EN 10.9.1180a2-6. For the various age classes of education in
the Spartan program, see Cartledge 2001a: 82-88 and Ducat 2006: 69-117.
43
I follow Kraut 1997: 158-159 against Newman 1885 I: 358 in finding in Aristotle’s program
overlapping developmental foci within each age-class. Thus, in the first age-class (from birth to
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habituation, and musical education separately produce individual elements of a liberal
education.
Although Aristotle’s three age-classes do not correspond to his three developmental
phases, Aristotle notes in several places that in order to become a good man, one must
“harmonize” (sumphônein [7.13.1332b5-6]) reason, nature, and habit (7.13.1332b3-11,
7.15.1334b6-12) and that process of harmonization proceeds in a sequential order (of sorts)
from bodily development to education by habituation to education of the mind (7.15.34b12-28;
cf. 8.3.1338b3-7). Let me focus first on bodily development.44 Aristotle prescribes guidelines
for bodily development throughout all three age-classes, but with different emphases within
different age-classes. He provides for light exercise (without strict dietary restrictions)
apparently from the age of two through the age of fourteen primarily through non-competitive,
the age of seven, described in Pol 7.17), the first two years focus primarily on bodily
development with some habituation towards cold, the period from age two until five continues
to focus on bodily development (through play) although with a greater sensitivity towards
proper habituation of the non-rational part of the soul, and the period from age five until seven
(which takes place outside the household), seems solely focused upon intellectual development
(namely, students observe—but apparently do not participate in—the studies undertaken in
the second age-group [7.171336b35-37]). (Aristotle notes in a couple of places that physical
training and intellectual training cannot be successful carried out simultaneously
[7.17.1336a22-25, 8.5.1339a7-10].) Aristotle is far more specific about paideia in the first seven
years than in the other two periods, although he seems to suggest that in the second age-class
(the period from age seven until puberty) students will pursue the studies described in Politics
8.3 (reading, writing, gymnastics, music, and drawing [8.3.1337b23-30]), whereas in the third
age-class (the period from puberty until 21), students will pursue “other studies” (allois
mathêmasi [1339a5]) from 15 until 17, followed by physical exertion and dietary training
(presumably in anticipation of military campaigns) until the age of 21 (8.4.1339a5-6). Are the
“other studies” an allusion to the philosophia mentioned at 7.15.1334a23 and 32?
44
Bodily development is also neo-natal, as it were: Aristotle discusses desirable ethnic natures
in Politics 7.7 and the guidelines for proper parental breeding in Politics 7.16. Physical
education is not starting from scratch.
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non-strenuous play (paidia); after a three-year hiatus (between ages fifteen and seventeen) in
which children are devoted solely to studies, he then provides for a four-year regime of
intensive exercise and strict dietary restrictions, immediately before military service. 45 The
emphasis in the first fourteen years is to facilitate bodily growth (auxêsis) while avoiding bad
habits (an issue to which I will return below). But in his thematic treatment of physical
education in Politics 8.4., Aristotle contrasts his program both with those traditional Greek
gymnastic programs that sought to produce athletes to compete in the various Pan-Hellenic
games and with the Spartan program that aimed to produce animal ferocity rather than a sense
of what is noble. In the former case, Aristotle thinks that both the stringent diets and the
exercises of competitive athletes stunt their physical development and thwart their bodily
ability to exercise liberal activities (7.16.1335b10-11)—for instance, procreation or serving in
the military.46 As I have shown above, in the latter case the Spartan program sought to produce
animal ferocity rather than the sense of nobility which is the basis for true courage, namely a
kind of courage directed towards the proper use of leisure as a goal which eclipses victory or
conquest in warfare (7.15.1334a20, 22). Although Aristotle explicitly isolates physical education
from habituation of the nonrational part of the soul, their separation seems more a matter of
45
See 7.17.1336a25-30, 8.4.1338b40-42, 1339a5-8. Although Aristotle focuses on bodily growth
from birth until the age of two, it is hard to characterize his recommendations under the
category of gymnastics (he is concerned with nourishment and development of limbs
[7.17.1336a3-11]).
46
See 7.16.1335b2-19, 8.4.1338b9-11. For the physiological reasons why Aristotle thinks
competitive athletic training impedes procreation, see Gen. Anim. 4.3.768b29-33 with Kraut
1997: 153-54, 185.
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analysis than of practice: it is hard to imagine that the physical education which Aristotle has in
mind is “value-free” or has no bearing on the recipient’s notion of what is fine.47
Aristotle explicitly incorporates habituation into his educational program very early on—
apparently soon after birth—by claiming that “it is beneficial to habituate (sunethizein
[7.17.1336a13]) children to the cold right from the time they are small, since it is very useful
both from the point of view of health and from that of military affairs” (7.17.1336a12-15).48
Aristotle invokes in two places what I will call the “Theodorus principle”: Theodorus was a
thespian in tragedy who never allowed another actor to play a part before he did, “because
audiences become accustomed (oikeoioumenôn [1336b30]) to the first voice they hear. The
same is true of our relationships with people and things; whatever we encounter first we like
better” (7.17 1336b30-33; cf. 1336a18-21). Yet even if Aristotle is clear that habituation needs
to commence very early in the best education program, his discussion of it blurs the analytical
distinction between developmental stages. As noted above, in the first age-class Aristotle
prescribes play as a form of light exercise to promote bodily development (1336a25-27). But
how one plays seems as important—if not more so—than that one plays because the practice
47
As Kraut 1997 notes, “It is a pity that Aristotle does not discuss the way in which physical
training fosters courage…How is nobility taught to the young through physical training?
Perhaps his idea is that if children are given the right sort of gymnastic exercises, they will
develop feelings of attachment to each other and to the city’s goals” (187). Promissory note:
Any hints in gymnastic education in Republic 3.403c-412b?
48
As noted above, Aristotle’s recommendation for habituation with respect to the cold follows
the Spartan practice of dressing children in light clothing (Lak. Pol. 2.4). The literature on
habituation is immense (although it has tended to focus upon the subject within the ethical
treatises and neglected Aristotle’s discussion of it in Politics 7.17; Bartok 2005 serves as a good
corrective of that habit). I have tried to survey and evaluate the literature on habituation in
Lockwood 2013.
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of play both improves the body and serves as an opportunity for habituation. Forms of play
require supervision because
The games they play should not be either unfit for free people (aneleutherous)
or exerting or undisciplined….For all such things should pave the way for their
later pursuits. Hence many of the games they play should imitate (mimêseis
[1336a24]) the serious occupations of later life (spoudazomenôn).
(7.17.1336b28-30, 32-34).49
As I have noted in section II of the paper, how an action is done is more important than the
type of action in determining the action’s liberalness. How one does something is also, of
course, determined by habituation. Habituation seems to come first in Aristotle’s educational
program because in some sense it permeates all other forms of education—whether bodily,
ethical, or intellectual.
Habituation in a more narrow sense is crucial to Aristotle’s educational scheme because
of its prophylactic power to inoculate young persons from what is shameful. In his discussion of
the first age-class, Aristotle goes so far as to outlaw shameful speech (aischrologia) not just for
young people, but from the city as a whole (7.17.1336b4). “Unseemly (aschêmonas) images
and stories (logous)”—he seems to in mind have iambus, comedy, and religious images and
rituals that incorporated mockery—will be off limits for young people, although an unfulfilled
promissory note indicates that attendance at performances requires further elaboration both
49
What sort of mimetic games does Aristotle have in mind? Kraut suggests “games in which
one plays at being a soldier, or in which one exchanges roles with others on an equal basis
(160). One is reminded, by contrast, of the games which disclosed Cyrus’ true identity as the
proper heir to the Persian throne (Histories, 1.114).
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for young people and for adults.50 What Aristotle seems to have in mind, perhaps in both cases,
is the prohibition or limitation of speech which mocks or even attacks another.51 But as I have
discussed above in my survey of Aristotle’s notion of eleutheros, in his discussion of wit,
Aristotle criticizes the “scurrility” or aischrologia of old comedy but praises the innuendo
(hyponoia) of new comedy (EN 4.8.1128a19-25). Aristotle’s case against mockery is not a
condemnation of wit per se, but rather a matter of how wit is used.52 In both the cases of
aischrologia and unseemly images and stories, Aristotle’s concern is that the development of
bad habits will sink first and deepest roots. Proper habituation—and indeed, paideia itself—is
that which will “render young people immune (apatheis) to the harm which [mockery and
unseemly images and stories] can do” (7.17.1336b22-23). Habituation in this narrow sense of
developing proper emotional responses to different stimuli—pleasures and pains, things which
are noble or less than noble—is thus a sort of default setting of the non-rational part of the soul
prior to the rational part of the soul’s judgment about those stimuli. It is also thus preparatory
for the musical education which teaches the rational part of the soul to make such judgments
finely.
50
7.17.1336b13-17, 20-23, 25-7. Pol 8.7.1342a16-27 suggests that there might be separate
performances for free and slavish audiences.
51
Aristotle claims that the legislator should outlaw aischrologia “since by speaking lightly of
shameful activity one comes closer to doing it” (7.17.1336b5-6). Kraut 1997 surveys Aristotle’s
discussions of aischrologia in the Ethics and Rhetoric and concludes that Aristotle’s “argument
depends on the implicit assumption that certain words are in themselves offensive, apart from
the consequences of using them” (162).
52
It is striking that wit—and more broadly the comedic—seems to have an essential
component not only of “laughing” but “laughing at” someone (and thus, mockery). Consistent
with that, the Poetics distinguishes comedy and tragedy on whether its object is elevated or
debased (Poet 3.1448a15-18, 4.1448b23-28).
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Aristotle thinks that musical education—including education in how to perform music—
provides a paradigmatic liberal education because it both habituates one to take pleasure in
what is fine and prepares one to judge properly wherein consists truly noble leisure (and thus it
too straddles Aristotle’s analytical division between habituation and education of the mind).
Indeed, Aristotle uses the testimony of Odysseus himself (in the banquet scenes from Odyssey 9
and 18 in which Odysseus invokes the bard)53 to show that music is a form of activity pursued
not because it is necessary for life, nor because it is useful, nor that it promotes health, but
rather that it is pursued solely for the purpose of leisure (8.3.1338a13-23). Politics 8.5 takes up
the question of the power (dunamis) of music and considers whether it consists in education
(paideia), amusement (paidia), or leisured pursuits (diagôgê).54 Although Aristotle immediately
notes that it is reasonable to think that music participates in all three, in several places (e.g.,
7.3.1337b28-32, 8.5.1340a1-10) he pushes back against the belief that the sole power or
purpose of music is amusement or pleasure. Aristotle claims in response that music is mimetic
53
At 8.3.1338a25-30 Aristotle quotes Odyssey 18.382-5 and 9.7-8 with the lines “call the bard
alone to the rich banquet” and “the banqueters seated in due order throughout the hall, give
ear to the bard.” Aristotle includes a line from Od 18 that is absent from our editions of the
Odyssey.
54
8.5.1339b10-15. The aporiai of Politics 8 are complicated and overlapping. 8.2.1337a35-b3
lays out four preliminary disagreements about the erga of music and then 8.3.1337b28-32
identifies as a problem whether music is pursued solely for the sake of pleasure. 8.5 begins by
invoking the previous aporiai (1339a11-14) and then claims to develop them “like a prelude”
(hosper endosimon [1339a13]; see Lord 1982, 68-70 for the musical allusion). 8.5 then delimits
the questions to two: what is the power of music and why (or whether) one should share
(metexin) in music, viz. learn it through instrumental music (1339a14-16). I take it that the
second question, whether the young should share in music through learning instrumental
music, is dealt with dialectically in 8.5.1339a26-1339b10, and then resolved in 8.6-7 (see, for
instance, 1340b20-23). The first question, what is the dunamis of music, is taken up and
resolved in the remainder of 8.5.1339b11-40b19. I am grateful to Malcolm Heath for sharing
with me his unpublished work on the textual organization of problems in Politics 8.
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or imitative and that everyone who listens to it comes to have the emotions which it imitates
even when rhythms and melodies are taken in isolation.55 He adds that “Since music happens to
be one of the pleasures, and virtue is a matter of enjoying, loving, and hating in the right way, it
is clear that nothing is more important than that one should learn to judge correctly (to krinein
orthôs [1340a17]) and get into the habit of enjoying decent characters and noble actions”
(8.5.1340a14-18).56 Musical education seems to have both “ethical” (in the sense of related to
the habituation of the non-rational part of the soul) and “intellectual” components.57 Aristotle’s
discussion of the proper development of enjoying, loving, and hating—which goes to the heart
of what the Ethics calls developing a love of the fine58—shows that music is capable of ethical
habituation. But his invocation of “proper judgment” is more broadly aesthetic in the sense of
being perceptually aware and attuned. No doubt, the aesthetic and ethical components of
musical education combine in a single individual. But what seems crucial to the elevation of
music as the pre-eminent liberal art is that it prepares one to share nobly in leisurely activity in
precisely the opposite fashion of the Spartan servile education. Spartan education certainly
trains the soul to experience certain emotions and have ethically appropriate desires, but it fails
55
8.5.1340a12-14. On the claim that music is mimetic for Aristotle, see Sörbom 1994, 37-46.
In the sequel, Aristotle notes that “When we listen to imitations our souls are changed”
(1340a22-23). The mechanism of such a change of character goes beyond my paper, but is the
subject of several papers. See further Woerther 2008, 89-103, Drefcinski 2011, 287-296, and
Brüllmann 2013, 345-373.
57
Aristotle’s discussion in Pol 7-8 incorporates concisely the same soul and virtue division as the
Ethics. See 7.14.1333a16-29, 7.15.1334b12-27. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1.13, 6.1-2.
58
See EN 10.9.1179b29-31
56
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to inculcate the critical ability to judge and discern adequately.59 By contrast, Aristotle
highlights performative musical education precisely because it trains not only the desiring part
of the soul, but also its discerning part.60
If one steps back from the details of Aristotle’s account, the following connections
between his account of the free person and liberal education emerge. First, gymnastic
education and bodily development in liberal education—by explicit contrast with Spartan
education—aims at producing citizens with the ability to exercise virtuously those activities
necessary for leisure, namely the exercise of courage and endurance. The contrast with
Spartan education implies that such a gymnastic education will inculcate a sense of what is fine,
which I have construed as meaning a sense of the purposiveness of martial activity as a means
towards the end of peace. Instruction by means of habituation, which clearly cuts across
gymnastic and musical education, has at least a two-fold function: the free person needs to
learn in what fashion virtuous activities are to be performed—that is, the reason why and the
“how” of an action—and he or she needs to develop a “second-nature” response to noble and
59
Jones 2012 argues that Aristotle distinguishes between two sorts of musical pleasure, the
moral pleasure accessible to those who have learned to perform and adequately appreciate
music and a natural pleasure felt by all listeners regardless of performance experience (159,
172-174). If she is right, then the fact that Spartan education excludes musical performance
may help explain why Aristotle is so critical of their ethical abilities in Politics II.9.
60
The remainder of Politics 8.6-7 is a reply to “some people” (perhaps the Spartans) who object
that performing music inevitably makes one servile (banauson). Although Aristotle concedes
that performance can be servile and boorish (8.6.1341b12, b14), he argues for three provisions
in his program to thwart such a trajectory, viz. musical education should exclude professional
competition (1341a10), be limited to certain instruments (1341a20-21; Wilson 1999 explains
Aristotle’s disapproval of the aulos), and be limited to certain melodies and rhythms
(apparently Dorian and perhaps also Lydian, although the text is fragmentary--on which see
Anderson 1966, 111-146; Lord 1982, 146-150; Ford 325-331).
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ignoble objects which insulates a person from potentially illiberal attitudes towards the world.
Finally, at least in the Politics, Aristotle seizes upon music as the paradigmatic form of liberal
education not only because it habituates the nonrational part of the soul but also—by explicit
contrast with Spartan education—because it trains the soul to exercise discernment and
judgment, a capacity that extends beyond music to other subjects. Aristotle’s liberally educated
person thus emerges as one prepared to exercise virtuously the martial, civic, and “scholastic”
activities which the best constitution affords to its citizens.
Conclusion
When one contrasts Aristotle’s admittedly truncated account of liberal education for
free persons with liberal education today, certainly one of its most striking characteristics is its
martial emphasis. Whether one focuses upon the habitual training so that infants can develop
endurance of cold or upon the post-pubescent period of education, four years of which are
devoted to stringent physical and dietary training, it is clear that Aristotle has in mind the
production of citizen-soldiers. The Spartan education system—at least to the extent to which it
was familiar to Aristotle—was an ideal foil, since it too sought to produce such citizen-soldiers
that could command the respect of the Hellenic world. But whereas Aristotle’s citizen-soldiers
were both oriented towards and prepared to exercise the scholastic virtues—including, but not
limited to courage and endurance—the education which Spartan citizen-soldiers received
incapacitated them to exercise excellently any scholastic virtue (including courage).
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In order to contextualize Aristotle’s account of liberal education in his best regime, it is
useful to remember his explicit reminders (including one at the beginning of Politics 8.1) that
different constitutions have different “mores” or beliefs-cum-habits and that it is the task of
education to inculcate such mores and prepare its citizens for flourishing lives within their own
constitutions.61 Thus, education is “relative” to the regime in which it takes place and can go
wrong in either of two ways: the aim of the educational scheme (like that of the constitution as
a whole) can be wrong and the practices of education within that polis can impede or even
contradict rather than inculcate the professed goal of that polis. Although Aristotle learned
from Sparta the importance of communal or public education, Spartan education also
demonstrated—through its errors—the importance of getting the aim and practices of
education right. Aristotle’s explicit remarks about Spartan education suggest that his own
program sought both to avoid the first error, by subordinating courage and endurance to the
virtues of leisure, and to avoid the second error, by rethinking the practice of gymnastic and
musical education.
Aristotle’s use of Sparta’s educational system as a foil to articulate his own program may
also help to explain what seems like one of his program’s great omissions, namely its almost
complete neglect of the sort of philosophical education one finds in Plato’s Republic or which
seems implied by the discussion of intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. For reasons
that go beyond what I can argue in this paper, Aristotle’s best regime is oriented towards non-
61
See 5.9.1310a11-23, 7.13.1332b5-10, 8.1.1337a5-10. See further Lord 1982: 36-67 and
Curren 2000: 93-125
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expansive political activity instead of the activity of philosophical excellence (7.3.1325b13-26).62
Aristotle’s explicit criticisms of Socrates’ educational program in the Republic are telling.
Aristotle notes that the purpose of education is to unify a community, and it is strange (atopon)
that
one who aimed to bring in education, and who believed that through it the citystate would be excellent, should think to set it straight [by communal property]
and not by habits, philosophy,63 and laws—as in Sparta and Crete, where the
legislator aimed to make property communal by means of the messes.
(2.5.1263b38-1264a1)
The educational system which aims at the model of the citizen-soldier exemplified by the
Spartan constitution is superior to that which sought to produce the citizen-scholar exemplified
by the Socratic constitution in the Republic. The Spartan educational system to Aristotle’s eyes
62
I take Aristotle’s best regime to be a practical blue-print for Greek colonists contemplating
the establishment of settlements in Asia minor in the 330s following Macedonian expansion;
see further Ober 1998: 291-95, 339-51; Samaras 2007: 77-89, and Kraut 2002: 192-95.
63
Aristotle’s invocation of philosophia either here (1262b40) and at 7.15.1334a23, 32 has
generated extensive scholarly debate about whether he means by that term the sort of activity
he himself undertakes in works like the Metaphysics and those of natural science (see, for
instance, Solmsen 1964, Lord 1982, Depew 1991, Reeve, 1998, and Nightingale 2001).
Although Aristotle mentions, “other studies” appropriate for students in their late teens (age
15-17) which are distinct from the studies of reading, writing, drawing, and music (8.4.1339a56), it seems hard to imagine three years of education as doing much more than developing
something like the appreciation of learned culture—rather than anything like the
mathematically rigorous educational program of the Republic. I think it is also telling that those
“other studies” are ultimate eclipsed both in duration and in placement within the education
trajectory by the four-years of paramilitary training that serve as the cap-stone of Aristotle’s
liberal education. Nonetheless, the incomplete nature of Politics 8 makes any answer to the
place of philosophy in Aristotle’s liberal education in his best regime ultimately speculative.
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was severely flawed in all the ways I have chronicled; and yet Aristotle chose to make it the foil
to his own educational program, rather than the educational program of the Republic.64
64
I am grateful to my fellow panelists, Greg Recco, Evanthia Speliotis, and Janet Dougherty for
their own thoughtful papers and discussion of matters Aristotelian at our panel.
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Appendix: Aristotle’s age-class educational program (Politics 7.17-8.7)
Seven-year
age-classes
Birth to age
7 (Pol 7.17)
Sub-class
divisions
Birth to year
2 (in
household)
Bodily development
2 to 5 years
(in
household)
-Bodily exercise in
play and games.
-Crying and screaming
permitted to develop
lungs.
-Light but nonstrenuous exercise.
-No strict dietary
restrictions
5 to 7 years
(in public)
Age 8 to
puberty (Pol
8.1-7)
No clear
breaks (in
public)
Puberty to
age 21 (Pol
8.4)
15-17
(in public)
18-21
(in public)
-Proper nourishment
for bodily strength.
-Movement for limb
development.
-Continuation of light
exercise (?)
-Strenuous
paramilitary training.
-Strict dietary training
in preparation for
military campaigns.
Habituated
development
-Habituation to cold.
Intellectual
development
-No remarks
-Games should be
neither illiberal nor
onerous, but instead
imitate “serious” roles
for adulthood.
-Avoid slaves.
-Outlaw aischrologia.
-Censor unseemly
pictures and stories
(including iambus and
comedy).
-Ethical development
through music.
-Development of
loving/hating in the
right way.
-Drawing to facilitate
the contemplation of
beautiful bodies.
-No learning
(mathêsis) which
impedes bodily
growth.
-No remarks
-Attendance at
comedies and public
theatre (?).
-Serve as observer
which will learn in
second age-class.
-Reading/writing.
-Development of
judgment (krinein)
through instrumental
music and learning to
sing.
-Musical education
terminates prior to
competitive or
professional
performance.
-“Other studies”
(philosophy?)
-No studies:
strenuous physical
activity precludes
intellectual studies.
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Servile Spartans : the problems of liberal education in Aristotle's Politics
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BRUEGEL’S VIA CRUCIS: (VISUAL) EXPERIENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF
INTERPRETATION
Geoff Lehman
Conference: What is Liberal Education For?
St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico
October 18, 2014
Introduction: Visual Pedagogy
This talk will focus on the close reading of a painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Via
Crucis, or, Carrying of the Cross (figure 1), with the idea of suggesting how such sustained
engagement with a single work of art over the course of one or several class sessions in a
seminar, or even as the basis for an entire course, poses similar challenges and has a similar
pedagogical value as the close reading of texts. I will also briefly indicate the rich dialogue
between Bruegel’s picture and a number of major Renaissance texts. My simple mention of these
texts can in no way do justice to them, but I merely hope to suggest ways that a work of visual
art can function meaningfully as part of an interdisciplinary course built around close reading
and discussion of texts. In addition, as an image that is self-reflexive in a characteristically
Renaissance fashion, the picture explicitly directs the viewer towards the problem of
interpretation and suggests the framework within which that interpretive process operates. In
other words, I would like to argue that the picture itself teaches. And I will mainly do this (due to
lack of time) simply by going through some of the problems of interpretation to which the
picture calls our attention. This interpretative problem, as Bruegel’s Via Crucis presents it, is
�2
effectively that of finding a middle way between absolute truth and complete absence of
determinate meaning; it is an understanding of the interpretive act as directed by, and actively
responsive to, its object, in a way that for that very reason is also open and multivalent in its
mode of address. Furthermore, this mode if address implicates another kind of “middle way” as a
defining characteristic of interpretation: the dialectical relationship between reflective
detachment and experiential embeddedness, both of which play an important role in the
interpretation of Bruegel’s painting. In both senses, I would argue, this interpretive mode is
particularly relevant to the goals and values of liberal education.
I. Pictorial Structure as Meaning
Bruegel’s Via Crucis, painted in 1564, probably on commission for his frequent patron
Nicolaas Jonghelinck,1 stands not only at a crucial point in Bruegel’s mature oeuvre but also near
the end of a long tradition of similar Netherlandish pictures of the subject that stretches back to
Jan Van Eyck (figure 2). The uniqueness of Bruegel’s picture, however, lies in the degree to
which the narrative is embedded within a field structured and articulated by juxtaposed
signifying elements and, even more importantly, divergent but coordinated (geometricallydefined) points of view. Furthermore, this pictorial structure presents itself, on the level of
expression, as a unified and atmospheric landscape, such that the structural principles and
affective power specific to landscape become the principal means through which the semantic
dimension of the work is articulated and the problem of interpretation itself brought to the fore.
The picture is characterized first and foremost by the horizon and the literal and
metaphorical breadth of vision it provides, even if the horizon itself is only glimpsed at the
1
A Via Crucis by Bruegel is mentioned in Jonghelinck’s inventory of 21 February 1565.
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center of the picture. Far from being a destination for receding orthogonals, it is rather more of
an emblem for the picture’s spatial generation and expansion: a radical alternative to the
recession of architectural units toward a center of vision that is the norm for perspectival
representation (figure 3). Just as the horizon indicates a notional infinity that is simultaneously a
mathematical concept and a visual intuition (the limit of vision), in the Via Crucis one senses
that the structure of pictorial space shapes the narrative and guides its interpretation not only in a
geometric but also in an intuitive sense: the experience of landscape as a lived environment is not
only evoked for the viewer of the picture but also shapes the experiences of the principal figures
in the narrative as well; that is, their apparent relationships with and experiences of the place
they inhabit play a decisive role, in the narrative itself and the interpretation of that narrative.2
Once this experiential dimension is taken into account, pictorial space grows from a means of
telling a story into a means to suggest and to multiply the possibilities for its interpretation into,
ultimately, a means to reflect upon knowledge itself and, on the other hand, to empathetically
share in a range of experiences.3 Indeed, the notion of point of view, grounded in the modality of
perspective, carries with it not only a literal visual sense and a metaphorical, interpretive one in
relation to the given subject matter, but also an epistemic one with respect to the world at large.
2
Numerous scholars have commented on the sense that Bruegel’s pictures provide commentary
on the interdependence of humanity and nature: see for instance Max Dvorák, “Pieter Bruegel
der Ältere” (1920), in Kunstgeschichte als Geistgeschichte: Studien zur Abendländischen
Kunstentwicklung (Berlin, 1995), p. 236; Walter Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth”: The World
Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton, 1989), p. xxiii; and Justus
Hofstede, “Zur Interpretation von Pieter Bruegels Landschaft: Aesthetischer Landschaftsbegriff
und Stoische Weltbetrachtung,” in Pieter Bruegel und seine Welt, ed. O. von Simson and M.
Winner (Berlin, 1979), pp. 140-41, with its comparison of the Via Crucis to Reanaissance
Stoicism.
3
Cf. Nils Büttner, Die Erfindung der Landschaft; Kosmographie und Landschaftskunst im
Zeitalter Bruegels (Göttingen, 2000), and the argument for landscape’s role in the rise of
cosmography and geography as sciences in the modern sense.
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In other words, the doubling of the literal and the cognitive in the reading of pictorial space
mirrors the doubling of literal and cognitive implicit in the horizon line itself, and indeed in the
theoretical foundations of perspective. In this sense the acts of viewing/painting and of thinking
are inseparable.4 Furthermore, I would argue, there is also an affective sense to the perspectival
depiction of viewpoint, as the geometrical-defined subjectivity of perspective theory (the
viewing eye as mathematical point) implicates a more broadly-based subjectivity when one is
looking at actual, physical paintings.
The procession to Calvary moves in a gradual helix from Jerusalem in the left
background, around the well-trodden tract of semi-barren landscape, to the desolate hilltop of
Golgotha, whose edge is framed by the calm domesticated space of a village. At the same time,
the curving trajectory with its predominantly festive crowd scene, continues past a bleak,
seemingly unending series of gallows (figure 4; compare: Goya, Disasters of War, number 36)
that carries with it both contemporary social commentary (these means of execution were
currently, and commonly, in use in the sixteenth century), and, beyond this, empathetically
produces a powerful emotional effect, even a sense of despair. The trajectory continues toward
the open sea and the infinity of the horizon, and thus charges that infinity with an affective power
(as both the implied extension of the foreground suffering, and a sense of calm and perhaps
release from it). The picture’s turning produces a harmony between, on the one hand, the
coordinated movements of hundreds of otherwise heterogeneously dispersed and individually
motivated, and characterized, figures and, on the other hand, the great meteorological shifts in
the sky. This change in weather from sunny to stormy also reflects the narrative itself, the
4
Cf. Edward Snow’s characterization of Bruegel as “a thinker, a Renaissance artist whose range
and penetration rival Shakespeare’s” (E. Snow, Inside Bruegel : The Play of Images in
Children’s Games [New York, 1997], p. 160).
�5
passage from life and Jerusalem to death on Golgotha, and builds toward the darkening of the
sky described in Matthew, chapter 27.5 The small strip of maritime horizon visible around the
picture’s central vertical axis seems just as much a possible origin of this vast turning articulation
of space as a destination, while the forces that guide pictorial exploration emphasize neither
alternative, but rather the wholeness of the turning universe depicted here. The open character of
landscape thus conditions the interpretation of the image as a whole, and the combination of an
interdependent unity and the lack of a simple focus informs the character of this world and its
inhabitants at the microcosmic level as well (as we will see). At the same time, the sense of a
holistic vision given by all of these aspects of the picture emphasizes the viewer’s cognitively
elevated and, at least initially, emotionally detached position, from which the narrative as a
whole appears within a global context, literally and metaphorically.
At the literal center of the panel we find Christ (figure 5), embedded unobtrusively in the
narrative while marked as the focal point by the semiotics of the pictorial field, a fact that has
often been noted.6 Likewise, the small scale of the principal figures and the coordination of
multiply-dispersed foci of attention among the largely indifferent crowd hide iconographic and
theological significance, and appear at first glance to subvert it. This coordination of apparent
contradictions functions both structurally (in terms of the relationship of surface to space) and
narratively (in terms of the relationship of Christian iconography to contemporary genre), and is
5
6
Matthew 27: 45.
See Robert Genaille, “La Montée au Calvaire de Bruegel l’Ancien,” Jaarboek Antwerpen
(1979), p. 160; also Joseph F. Gregory, “Toward the Contextualization of Pieter Bruegel’s
Procession to Calvary; Constructing the Beholder from Within the Eyckian Tradition,”
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 1996, p. 216.
�6
one of the means by which the problem of interpretation is self-reflexively indicated.7
Furthermore, this particular view, defined perspectivally by horizon and frame, determines a
privileged access to the Christian meaning of the narrative—that is, to revealed truth. This
knowledge is itself far from an absolute point of reference, however, circumscribed as it is by its
own perspectivally relativized horizon. Indeed, the uncertainty of central, or at least
unquestioned, subject matter remains, something true of an entire category of Renaissance
religious pictures in the Netherlands known as Andachtsbilder (figure 6; compare: Brunswick
Monogrammist, Via Crucis), where the act of thought, contemplation, or prayer before the image
is understood to involve sustained reflection upon the subject matter and its significance as
opposed to mere recognition.8
II. Coordinated Viewpoints: Perspectival Epistemology
While other Netherlandish depictions of the subject include a ring of spectators within the
work, implying a relationship of viewer (with a high vantage level) to surrogate viewer (lower
and nearer vantage level) to earthbound narrative scene, in Bruegel’s picture the varieties of
spectatorship are both more varied and more coordinated, ranging from passionately engaged to
indifferent and including numerous pockets of localized attention or self-absorption (figure 7).
Here the use of commensurable horizons, with the metaphorical implications (particularly
cognitive ones, i.e., viewing as knowing) of the range of vantage points they coordinate,
7
Cf. Pierre Francastel, Bruegel (1969; reprinted Paris, 1995), p. 144; Mark A. Meadow,
“Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary: Aemulatio and the Space of Vernacular Style,” Nederlands
Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (1996), p. 188; and Gregory, “Toward the Contextualization,” p. 216.
8
See Gregory, “Toward the Contextualization,” p. 210. On intentional ambiguity as an invitation
to contemplation of religious meaning, see Reindert Falkenburg, “Pieter Bruegels Kruisdraginig:
een proeve van ‘close-reading,’” Oud Holland 107 (1993), pp. 17-33. See also Ethan Matt
Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (Cambridge, 1999), esp. pp. 5-7.
�7
becomes a foundation for interpretation of the subject matter. The representation of multiple
responses to the Christian narrative in terms of viewers whose points of view are different in
ways that are measurable, proportional, analogous in the original Greek sense of the word,
frames interpretation as a problem of knowledge, or more precisely, frames vision as an
epistemic position and an interpretive act. 9
In Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, the allegorical figure of Folly imagines the perspective of a
viewer observing the vanity of human activity from high above and gives expression to a longfamiliar literary trope: the high vantage point as a position of epistemic superiority.10 Indeed,
Erasmus invokes similar passages from the Iliad in which Zeus or Poseidon gaze at the battle
from the clouds above,11 with the difference that in Erasmus the bird’s-eye view primarily serves
the function of moral commentary and social criticism.12 In the case of Bruegel’s Via Crucis,
however, the high vantage point engenders juxtapositions that are much more complex: for
Bruegel’s picture is a perspectival view, situating the viewer in a particular spot with a spatial
relationship to objects not only below but also above, and to the vantage points, themselves
differentiated, of numerous central and marginal figures within the narrative. Perspective makes
9
Cf. Francastel, Bruegel, p. 130, discussing the paintings of 1559-60: “L’universe de la
connaissance et celui de la representation coincident, toutfois à travers l’image, qui est ton
signe.”
10
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 15 (trans. H. H. Hudson, Ware, Hertfordshire, 1998]), p. 31: “Come,
then, and suppose a man could look from a high tower, as the poets say Jove is in the habit of
doing. To how many calamities would he see the life of man subject!”
11
12
See especially Iliad XI, 80-83; XI, 353-54; and XIII, 11-18.
The parallel between Erasmus and Bruegel is especially striking in the paintings of 15591560—the Netherlandish Proverbs, Carnival and Lent, and Children’s Games—with their at
least partially satirical character. See Gibson, Bruegel (London and New York, 1977), p. 78.
�8
these viewpoints commensurable even if their relationships remain enigmatic,13 since in a
perspective image the metaphorical viewpoint is always necessarily doubled by a literal,
geometrically-defined one. For instance, the pair of foreshortened circles seen one from below
and one from above near the right edge of the picture are not only thematically related as two
sites of execution, they also calibrate our vantage point as lying between them, and consequently
between that of the crowd below and the blackbird above. (It is also worth noting here that the
numerous birds in the picture, including notably a flock of starlings flying near the windmill,
also serve to invoke the imaginary flight of pictorial exploration. Thus the painting evokes not
only fixed vantage points but also moving ones, with all the implications that holds for the
experience of viewing pictures.)
We are indeed elevated above the crowd—we see more, we know more—it is for us, only
us, that perspectival vision pins Christ at the crux of the picture’s central horizontal and vertical
axes. Perhaps only we recognize the divine incarnation amidst the contemporary crowd, and
significantly, it is only from our vantage point that the anachronistically rendered group of holy
figures, facing toward us, appears in meaningful juxtaposition with the rest of the scene.14 Yet at
the same time we perceive vantage points above ours, we are aware of the limits of our vision.
The miller leaning by the side of the windmill and observing the scene (figure 8) sees farther
than we, and also differently: through him we can imagine a vantage point at the center of a
circle of which Christ moves along the circumference. The procession turns around the axis of
his viewpoint, a continuous motion like that of the sails of the windmill beside him, further
echoed in the circular base of the mill that itself seems designed to rotate—a turning suggestive
13
Cf. Michael Gibson, The Mill and the Cross: Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Way to Calvary, author’s
trans., Lausanne, 2000, esp. p. 76.
14
See Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,” p. 189.
�9
of a conflation of the passion cycle and the cycles of nature: changing weather, the seasons,
processes of growth and decay, death and life. In fact, our vantage point is calibrated between an
opposing pair of viewers on a vertical axis, for directly below sits a peddler, independently
absorbed in his own thoughts and perhaps even unaware of the procession before him (figure
9).15 Between self-enclosure and breadth of vision, the immediacy of presence and the
detachment of knowledge, runs the alley toward Christ that Simon of Cyrene, aware of Christ’s
presence but not his significance, resists taking (figure 10).16
This epistemic coordination doubles an affective one: the dialogue among a range of
emotional responses to the shared experience of the central event. Bruegel indicate the varieties
of response at ground level in the juxtaposition of spectators within the crowd —most indifferent
or preoccupied with their own activities, some carried along exuberantly with the procession
(culminating in the fool sounding a horn), some curious, a few sympathetic or grieving—and this
reaches a focused intensity in the pair at far right: one sorrowfully leans on a tree and another,
sometimes taken to be the artist’s self-portrait, gazes out perpendicular to our line of vision, with
both intellectual detachment and sincere interest (figure 11; compare: the possible self-portrait in
Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding).17 There’s even a sense that the epistemologically-charged axis
15
M. Gibson offers as one possible reading of the juxtaposition of miller and peddler a symbolic
opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism (The Mill and the Cross, pp. 62-64). The
problem with iconographic and contextualizing readings such as these is that, in my view, they
don’t take adequate account of the visual and structural specificity of pictures, especially in the
case of such a striking and idiosyncratic depiction as that of the windmill atop its rocky pinnacle
in this painting. Commentary on the relationship of the Protestant Reformation to Catholicism
may or may not be implied here, but in any case, I would argue, it would be subsidiary to the
larger epistemological issues raised by the picture in the terms specific to its idiom as visual
representation.
16
17
Cf. Matthew 27: 32.
On the identification of the self-portrait, see Michael Auner, “Pieter Bruegel—Umrisse eines
Lebensbildes,” in Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 52 (1956), pp. 107-09.
�10
discussed above—peddlar and windmill, with the Simon group in the center—is paralleled on the
right by an axis of compassion, or affect, defined by the mournful Marian group below and the
gallows above, with the wretched and suffering condemned prisoners in the center (figure 12).
Although the picture’s structure of coordinated and respectively limited viewpoints and
experiences may imply the possibility of relativizing Christian meaning, nevertheless it does not
allow us to rest comfortably with that reading, or any other that would purport to claim absolute
authority, guiding us rather to the middle ground of a carefully calibrated interpretive pluralism.
The vantage point given by the windmill suggests at once a perspective higher and more godlike
than ours, one that more fully brings narrative and theological interpretation into harmony with a
larger vision of nature, but it is also, in the mathematical terms of perspective, necessarily also an
arbitrary and contingent viewpoint, just as ours is. Consider, by contrast, the central pane of
Hieronymous Bosch’s Haywain, or a miniature painting of The Baptism of Christ from the
margins of a page in the Turin-Milan Book of Hours, probably by Jan van Eyck (figure 13): each
indicated the possibility of a divine, i.e., absolute, vantage point, something absent in Bruegel’s
picture. The dialectic between the power of vision and its necessary limits is played out in the
Via Crucis, through the coordination of different but necessarily limited viewpoints, as its own
unending cycle, and one that carries with it the possibility of commentary on the very problem of
knowledge.
In the dedicatory letter to The Prince, Machiavelli signals that text’s participation in this
discourse about knowledge created by perspective. To quote the relevant passage: “For just as
those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of
mountains and high places and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop
mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know
�11
well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.”18 A third position, knowing both
princes and people, and the relationship between them, may be the one the reader (like
Machiavelli) actually occupies, though that point of view too of course has its necessary limits.
Machiavelli’s use of this pictorial metaphor is far more than a rhetorical device, given its deep
significance for the entire text, with its politics based on mutual perceptions of appearances from
various distances (i.e., with various degrees of deception involved) that nevertheless constitutes,
on the whole, a genuine form of knowledge. Indeed, The Prince may be one of the first nonpictorial works to use perspective as an epistemological metaphor, as the Via Crucis does.19
III. Towards a Perspectival Metaphysics
Finally. to consider one additional Renaissance text, perhaps the most relevant of all for
Bruegel: in his De docta ignorantia of 1440, Nicholas Cusanus presents the following thought
experiment: “Accordingly, as it will always seem to the observer, whether he be on the earth, or
on the sun or on another star, that he is in the quasi-motionless center and that all the other
[things] are in motion, he will certainly determine the poles [of this motion] in relation to
himself; and these poles will be different for the observer on the sun and for the one on the earth,
and still different for those on the moon and Mars, and so on for the rest. Thus, the fabric of the
world (machina mundi) will quasi have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere,
18
19
Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Mansfield, Chicago, 1985, p. 4.
Cf. Claudio Guillén, “One the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective,” in Stephen G. Nichols,
Jr., and Richard B. Vowles eds., Comparatists at Work (Waltham, Mass., and London, 1968), pp.
28-91. Guillén, however, discusses the origins of perspective’s metaphorization in both
epistemological and metaphysical terms within the philosophical and literary traditions of the
seventeenth century, apparently not taking into account Renaissance pictures, and to some extent
texts (e.g., Machiavelli’s Prince), that evidently use perspective in these metaphorical senses one
or two centuries earlier.
�12
because the circumference and the center are God, who is everywhere and nowhere.”20 This
cosmological interpretation of perspective, part of Cusanus’s notion of a physical universe that is
both centerless and unbounded (interminatus is Cusanus’s word in the Latin21), would later
inspire Giordano Bruno, maybe the first thinker to unequivocally assert the absolute,
mathematical infinity of the physical universe.22
In the Via Crucis, the central vertical axis not only governs the depiction, via perspective,
of a centerless and unbounded universe but also suggests the metaphysical problem of physical
infinity as a contraction of the divine infinite, as Cusanus describes it at various points in De
docta ignorantia, and as his analogy between physical universe as infinite sphere and God as
infinite sphere in the passage quoted above implies. On that pictorial axis Christ, God made man,
appears, midway between the rocky outcropping where we presumably stand and the marine
horizon. The central vertical axis on the picture’s surface thus also constitutes an axis of depth
leading to the horizon, articulating the relationship between subject and object, between the
viewer and the physical infinity of nature. In other words, the image of Christ appears in the
center of perspective’s foundational orthogonal axis, between the viewer and the horizon,
collinear with the vertical axis on the panel, of which he also occupies the center. In this sense
the image of infinite physical space is juxtaposed with the image of God, of the metaphysical
20
Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, II, cap.xii, 21v.
21
See Alexandre Koryé, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore and London,
1957), pp. 6-8 and 11-13.
22
See Bruno, La cena de le ceneri (1584), in Opere Italiane, ed. G. Gentile, vol.1 (Bari, 1907),
p. 73, and Bruno, De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584), in Opere Italiane, vol.1, p. 309. Bruno
presents this conception of an infinite universe specifically in terms of the horizon: see esp.
Bruno, De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584), in Opere Italiane, vol.1, p. 309; English trans.
from D. Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno, his Life and Work [New York, 1950], p. 280.
�13
infinite. The shift from infinity as God to infinity as Cartesian space,23 a shift for which,
historically speaking, the development of perspective plays the decisive role, could thus be said
to find visual expression on the central vertical axis of Bruegel’s picture. Indeed, this axis
becomes emblematic of the broader shift in the notion of infinity from metaphysical to physical
that is central to Cusanus’s theology: namely, the relationship of the absolute infinite (God) to
the contracted infinite (the physical universe). And in fact, there is another pair of viewers in
dialectical opposition that emblematize these alternatives and their coexistence: the miller looks
down at Christ, God incarnate within the physical world, from the windmill’s rocky outcropping,
while beside him and turning in counterpoint to his turning, a blackbird in a tree looks out
towards the horizon, the indication of the mathematical infinity proper to that physical world
itself (figure 14; compare this detail with the related dialectic of paired gazes in Bruegel’s Two
Monkeys).
Conclusion: Modes of Experience
A consideration of pictorial structure, and more significantly still, of perspectival space as
a coordination of analogous viewpoints, is crucial in that it allows the process of interpretation to
grow from a direct response to the painting qua visual representation, that it gives the object
itself and its pictorial idiom its due—and furthermore, in that it allows one to remain sensitive to
the picture’s own “thought processes,” its internal interpretive self-reflexivity.24 However, it is in
the specific character of organic unity and experiential immediacy—the experiential dimension
23
24
See Koryé, Closed World to Infinite Universe, pp. 18-19.
Cf. Gregory, “Toward the Contextualization,” p. 210, n. 7, speaking of the inverted narrative
compositions of the Via Crucis: “Insofar as the form of the image assumes an epistemological
function here, insofar as it is not reducible to a determinate, iconographical meaning, it subverts
the traditional dependency of images upon determinate and extrinsic textual relations.”
�14
through which the Via Crucis is in the deepest, phenomenological sense a landscape—that much
of its peculiar power, semantic and expressive, ultimately resides. And thus the best
interpretations are those that emerge from close attention to the full experience the painting
offers to a viewer. With this in mind, I would like to close with a brief consideration of some
experiences depicted in a small area of the painting in the lower right (figure 15), with the
suggestion that in returning to the microcosmic aspects of the picture (the experiences of the
individual figures), the viewer’s experience of the picture as a whole and the problems of
knowledge, attention and emotional response that it raises are the surest guide. For it is this
macrocosmic interpretive mode itself, raising as it does the question of the necessary
incompleteness of any interpretive act, that encourages us to consider more deeply precisely
those figures who might otherwise seem marginal but whose cognitive or emotional states seem
particularly perplexing.
Near the foreground group of holy figures, in addition to the figures expressing
astonishment or grief at the sight of the condemned criminals passing by, and in addition to the
one mourning in empathy with the Virgin, oblivious to the imminent passing of Christ himself
(to which two figures attempt to direct her attention), there are two other typically Bruegelian
figures whose experiences of the event are harder to account for. One is a very young child
looking at the viewer, the face mask-like, with a combination of innocent curiosity and
disturbing proximity to dangerous or troubling events encountered so often in the figures of
chidren elsewhere in Bruegel’s work, including elsewhere in the Via Crucis (figure 16). Another
figure, also a child, crosses the river, or more likely pauses, and extends his hand. Perhaps he is
reaching to his companion across the river, though it is not clear that this gesture actually
expresses such a desire for effective action or communication. Perhaps he is preoccupied with
�15
something he holds in his hand but that we can’t quite see. There’s something more enigmatic
than mere focused attention here: an immediacy of ordinary, momentary experience that is not
clearly directed to any end, or, as a state of attention, that is multiply directed. It suggests a kind
of being in the world that involves active effort without obvious purpose, of a type that is very
much a part of everyday life, though often unobserved (figure 17; compare this with a detail
from Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, where the varieties of work and leisure activity depicted
there include one figure whose engagement with the world suggests such non-goal-oriented yet
earnest negotiation, viz., the man grappling with a small tree by the riverbank).
In a picture which addresses various modes of knowing and feeling and that raises the
problem of attention in the highly charged context of divine immanence within ordinary life,
there is always a remainder that escapes meaning, that is irreducible to any coordinated system of
alternatives, however exhaustive. And for me it is in the character of those experiences, both
ordinary and strange (strange because they are usually unobserved in actual life) that much of the
continuing fascination of Bruegel’s painting lies. The abiding strangeness and ordinariness of the
world as re-presented in directly visual terms, if one does the work required to be able to begin
seeing it, provides, I think, the best support for the interpretive and responsive activity that
constitutes the shared encounter with a work of art in the context of a discussion seminar.
�16
Figure 1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Via Crucis (Carrying of the Cross), oil on wood panel, 1564
�17
Figure 2: Copy after Jan (and/or Hubert) van Eyck (artist unknown), Via Crucis, oil on wood
panel, early 16th century
Figure 3: Bruegel, Via Crucis; Perspective diagram from Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura,
1435-36
�18
Figure 4: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis; Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Disasters of War,
number 36, etching with aquatint, c. 1810-20 (published 1863)
Figure 5: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis
�19
Figure 6: Brunswick Monogrammist (Jan van Amstel?), Via Crucis, oil on wood panel, 1530s?
(Paris, Louvre)
Figure 7: Details from Bruegel, Via Crucis
�20
Figure 8: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis
Figure 9: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis
�21
Figure 10: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis
Figure 11: Details from Bruegel, Via Crucis; Detail from Bruegel, Peasant Wedding, oil on
wood panel, c. 1567-68
�22
Figure 12: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis
Figure 13: Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain, central panel, oil on wood, 1500-02; Hand G (Jan
van Eyck?), Baptism of Christ, manuscript illumination from the Turin-Milan Hours, c. 1417-30
�23
Figure 14: Details from Bruegel, Via Crucis; Bruegel, Two Monkeys, oil on wood panel, 1562
Figure 15: Detail from Bruegel, Via Crucis
�24
Figure 16: Detail from the following pictures by Bruegel, all oil on wood panel: Children’s
Games (1560); Hunters in the Snow (1565); The Census at Bethlehem (1566); Via Crucis;
Children’s Games; The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1567); Via Crucis
Figure 17: Details from Bruegel, Via Crucis; Detail from Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow
�
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Cultural Institutions, Theatre, and Humanistic Liberal Arts Education: Where Do We
Go from Here?
J. Scott Lee, Executive Director, Association for Core Texts and Courses
Recent education conferences tend to illustrate a sense of an impending loss of liberal
education within a tide of cultural crisis. The call for this conference at St. John’s College on
“What Is Liberal Education For?” “recogniz[es]” that the traditions of education at liberal arts
colleges “have been put on the defensive.” The call finds an “emerging consensus” that
“consumerism,” “new economic challenges,” and “the fragmentation of general studies” caused
by specialization were “symptomatic” of “a crisis of uncertainty and disorientation affecting
every field of human endeavor.” The call asserts liberal education “can reaffirm its relevance
and [humane] purposes” in response to this broad crisis.
St. John’s College is not alone in formulating a crisis that liberal education faces. Phi
Beta Kappa and the American Council of Academic Deans and the Working Group of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University are only some of the most notable bodies that
have discussed the stress liberal education faces. The 2013 PBK/ACAD conference call was
hardly less sweeping than the SJC call, stating that higher education is “undergoing …
transformations” of economic necessity, and that education is being “driven by technology” or
by demographic stresses on class rigidity for millions of families who aspire for a better life.
The call seemed to say that the transformations have put the “structure and character of higher
education” along with the entire democratic premises of American society at risk, and that these
transformations not only have subjected higher education to the winds and change of fortune, but
that more than any other branch of higher education, liberal arts and sciences are suffering
“scrutiny” more than ever.
�A recent spate of defenses of the humanities and humanism, the college, and the purpose
of education -- by Martha Nussbaum, Tony Kronman, Andrew Delbanco, Patrick Deneen, and
Reinhard Hütter -- adumbrate a destruction of liberal education correlated to the economic,
scientific, and technological conditions under which we live. i ii
Each author attempts to revive
traditions of liberal education by linking it to sustaining democracy, spiritual needs of cultures,
or understandings of faith. All find the soul of our students and our citizens is at stake, though,
of course, the constitution of that soul and the education designed to nurture it are at issue
amongst them.
Collectively, they might be called ‘the whole person defense’ of liberal
education.
A common concern among our authors is whether our cultural assumption that we can
transform almost anything, particularly through the technology of science, is good for our souls,
good for liberal education, and good for our species. For Nussbaum, technology appears as the
competing, attractive image of students in the lab, instead of pictures of students “thinking,” that
administrators use to lure students to universities. iii Delbanco notes that the advantage that
sciences have over the humanities in public evaluations is landmarks which technological
advances provide, though an occasional historical or philosophic “breakthrough” be
acknowledged. iv For Kronman and Deneen, technology is the differential gear which imparts
varying force to science, culture, and education. Further, Kronman and Deneen come very close
to each other in noting the meretricious effects upon our character, upon our sense of limits,
which technological achievement unleashes in the form of pleonexia. The humanities currently
fail to address it (Kronman), or education encourages it through a philosophy of transformation,
of creating original knowledge and innovations through research (Deneen). v Hütter suggests that
the humanities cannot address “dire” transformational issues involving both the university and
�society because the kind of soul that the humanities might try to produce through education, the
imaginative faculty, is inadequate to examine the whole realm of knowledge and conduct the
metaphysical search for truth Hütter believes would not only ground a liberal education, but,
possibly, turn the sciences toward a self-examination of ends. vi
Finally, most seem to be convinced that the products of arts are essential to any revival
and while they are skilled fashioners of argument in areas where no single discipline can claim
accepted precedence, the discussion of fine or liberal arts and their products is not in terms of art,
but in the terms of the political, cultural, or religious end sought. For example, Nussbaum
devotes large portions of her book exploring arts and a whole chapter to “Cultivating the
Imagination: Literature and the Arts.” In the latter, we learn that “in order to be stably linked to
democratic values [the artistic cultivation of ‘capacities for play and empathy in a general way,
and (the) address (of) particular cultural blind spots’] requires a normative view of how human
beings ought to relate to one another… and, therefore, requires selectivity regarding the artworks
used.” vii A catalog follows of the failures of artworks, of “defective forms of ‘literature,” to
cultivate the sympathy that Nussbaum desires. Undoubtedly, Kronman’s understanding of the
search for meaning and his discussion of civilizational “conversation” depends on art;
Delbanco’s distinction between research and reading instances canonical works from ancient to
modern times; and Deneen’s argument is concerned with a residium of teachings that earlier
great books leave us. Aside from promoting the cultivation of the imagination, Hütter seems
nearly indifferent to art works selected. Whether by disinterest, by concentration on ends mostly
external to liberal education, or through contempt for ‘know-how’ wrought by real misgivings
over modern technology, these discussions tend to obscure and ignore the importance of the arts
– broadly, the technē -- of the liberal arts. viii In sum, all mention liberal arts education; most
�defend the fine or liberal arts, but none of these authors ground their defenses of liberal arts
education in art per se. Thus, in these social-moral defenses, an entire line of argument
concerning the arts is, for the most part, relegated to an instrumental, supporting, or ancillary role
in a discussion that might be titled: “social conditions, educational institutions, and individual
capacities: wither liberal education?” ix
Notwithstanding the good will of many scientists, it is largely humanists and political
philosophers who have inherited the liberal education traditions of practice and defense in
today’s universities and colleges. A problem exists now: as a defense of liberal education, these
political/cultural arguments have not worked and there are signs that their appeal is really
flagging. Robert Ferrall, Jr, former President of Beloit College, has extensively documented the
actual decline in the demographics and finances of colleges in his book Liberal Arts at the Brink.
He calls for ‘collective action on the part of liberal arts colleges’ in order that ‘high school
seniors [counselors and parents will see] the value of a liberal arts education [because] the entire
community, that is, society as a whole, will [have been so] persuaded.’ (158-160). This
particular paper agrees with that view and argues that a pervasive discussion of liberal arts,
beginning in the academy and extending to the public is necessary as part of that much larger
effort. While I think there are challenges, the purported crisis in liberal education can be
approached in a way not usually developed in current discussions at any length: I mean we could
speak of an education in liberal arts. In the terms of today’s discussions, liberal arts education
is always secondary, a servant to some other larger concern. Further, as far as I can tell, there
has been no discussion of what a renewed interest in the arts might do in universities and
colleges when set in the context of other types of institutions which employ the arts. When the
�question arises about the articulation and persuasive power of a liberal arts education defense, it
seems beneficial to consider similar institutions and their problems and successes with the arts.
I’ll continue, then, with why we might want to discuss art, and how I’m using the term.
Then, I’ll look at a cluster of institutions that employ the arts: these include orchestras, museums,
churches, humanistic liberal arts education, and the theatre. We’ll examine some of the troubles
four of these institutions currently face, and we will see that theatre offers a model of
cooperative, public arts which humanistic liberal arts education might consider in addressing its
current problems. Finally, I’ll develop a possible renewal of the liberal arts which might both
address current problems in colleges and help to change public perceptions of liberal arts
education. Thereby, we would enrich the ecology of our defense and, I think, make perceptible what it
is our students are capable of.
Forty to fifty years ago when one went to college, one chose to get a B.A. or a B.S.
Notwithstanding a plethora of alternatives, the same choice is still available and nobody doubts
that students graduating, today, with a B.S. possess a science. I’ve been wondering, what art or
arts do those graduating with a B.A. possess?
The question seems relevant, for while undoubtedly exempla of the fine arts are discussed
in courses taken by bachelor-of-arts candidates, it is not at all clear that bachelor-of-arts degrees
are aimed at exploration of arts. Nor is it clear that traditions of education in the liberal arts,
more than two thousand years of development of the trivium, quadrivium and other arts which
have staked a claim to liberal arts education, are a component part of a bachelor of arts. Finally,
while most bachelor-of-science students would probably self-describe their capacities and
courses of instruction in scientific terms, it seems doubtful that those educated in the humanities
or, possibly, political philosophy, would self-describe in artistic terms. Maybe the term,
�‘bachelor-of-arts’ should be dropped altogether, but we would simply be further reducing our
argumentative ecology by eliminating a widely recognized, if not well understood, distinguishing
mark of the education we support.
More probingly, the word, “art,” like the word “science,” has many associations and,
therefore, implies the question, “what is art?” and, thus, the question “what would a ‘bachelor-ofarts’ indicate?” The range of Aristotle’s discussion of art provides, I think, a suitable scope for
viewing the problems of humanistic liberal education in this light, because the range of
Aristotle’s discussions suggests the almost vast territory arts in an education could explore. For
Aristotle art means the capacity to make, the activity of making, and the object made that is
separated from a maker. Thereby, the generic term, “art,” comprehends these three specific,
correlative relations. For Aristotle art runs from the intellectual virtue of techne, (N.E. VI, iv)
which is the etymological root of our modern terms, technique and technology, through
formulations of specific arts as capacities or powers (dynamis) humans exercise – particularly
those concerned with thought, for example, the arts of dialectic and rhetoric (Rhet I, 2 1355b), to
the objects of human production (dynamis: Poetics 1, 1447a) x such as lyrics, comedies, tragedies
or epics, instrumental music, choirs, painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanical arts, medicinal
treatment, indeed, almost any made thing that usually happens and is not spontaneous, a product
of chance or of nature (Phys II, 5). Thus, for Aristotle, art is a cause of things coming into being
in this world that, otherwise, would not exist without active human agency (N.E., VI, 4). It
touches our deepest natures and desires, exercises our minds and passions to a degree of
inventiveness that our imaginations struggle to keep up with, incorporates almost anything that
the universe has to offer, and results in a changed world that, without art, would be barren or, at
best, no more than a garden of Eden. Art partakes of the characteristics of our modern
�disciplines; knowledge is an important mark of the arts for Aristotle. Indeed, at points where
knowledge of arts converges with experience, Aristotle’s view on art begins to approach the
modern view of the necessity of knowledge to be empirical. (Meta I i) For Aristotle, the
teaching of art, as a sign of the possession of knowledge, refers not only to the ordering of
experience but the causes of what exists and how it is produced – again, a position not that
distant from modernity. (Meta I i) Aristotle repeatedly identifies arts as origins of invention and
as often ties these origins to the development of knowledge as well as the invention of new
products and capacities (Soph Encl end, Poetics 4, Meta I i). Indeed, the arts may lay the
foundation for the purely speculative sciences, not only because some of the arts do not aim at
utility, but because even useful arts may involve a component associated with the speculative
sciences – contemplation (Rhet, def). Moreover, art, faculties, and thought are all described by
Aristotle (MetaphysicsVII, 7) as producers of makings, so that when a faculty or thought itself
becomes subject to reflection or theorizing about the causes of thought in respect of specific
ends, it is possible to speak of an art which contemplates and artistically produces thought. This
is precisely what happens in the definition of rhetoric. xi The thoughts reflected on are pistoi,
persuasives, and Aristotle writes extensively in the introduction to the treatise that Dialectic and
Rhetoric, as arts, are counterparts and share many, not all, of the same concerns with inference,
enthymemes and examples in rhetoric, syllogisms and induction in dialectic. The prefatory
matter of the Topics is much more restricted, but dialectic concerns the opinions, doxa – of all or
the majority or the wise – and it aims at methodical conversations and the examination,
reasonings, about the bases of the sciences and problems susceptible of address by opinion. (I. 1,
100a 18-25). So, particularly in their critical and poetic functions, the arts frequently stand
outside the normative conventions of disciplinary thought while retaining an artistic character
�(Parts of Animals I, 1, 639 and Poetics 25 1460a14-1461a8). The combination of criticism,
poetic production, and technological development wrought by art means that art, in Aristotle, is
foundational to invention and freedom; we make, for ourselves, the possibilities that we
experience. Thus, artistic invention and freedom pervasively influence institutions: Aristotle’s
thinking on art is adept enough to conduct something like thought experiments about institutions,
not only about liberal arts education, but about public debate and critical evaluation of the arts
and sciences, as well as the audience for them. All of these artistic concerns deeply affect
humanistic liberal education for they situate in a paideia the four concerns of the humanities:
transmission, interpretation, judgment, and invention, and they suggest, thus, what might lie
behind a ‘bachelor-of-arts’ degree.
While it would be a mistake, I think, for a bachelor-of-arts degree to be subsumed under
or defined by any one particular artistic concern, so that it became simply another disciplinary
endeavor, it is not a mistake to see whether particular arts in an institutional context might
suggest some help for liberal education. Not only liberal education, but many other older
cultural institutions are facing uncertain, perhaps disoriented, futures, as newer technologies and
fashionable art forms seem to be supplanting them. The New Republic has noted unsuccessful
attempts by orchestras, seeking to maintain support, to substitute social outreach programs,
audience participation, and adoptions of more popular music forms in place of the studied
appreciation of the classical repertory, an appreciation acquired more or less over a lifetime. The
New York Times recently noted the decline of space allotted to contemplation within museums in
favor of installations offering “experience.” xii Establishment and fundamentalist churches, a
third great cultural institution, have suffered increasing disaffections of attendance regardless of
denomination. xiii Humanistic, liberal arts university and college programs, since the recession,
�are widely reported to be suffering cutbacks, much lower student application and humanities
major rates, as well as loss of financial private giving. xiv In other words, a cluster of some of our
most important cultural institutions appear unmoored from their traditional grounds of
acceptance and support. The one exception is the theatre. To cut a long story short, on the
whole its audiences are not disaffected, its non-profit theatres recovered well and quickly from
the recession, its audience attendance is much better than comparative trends in cinema, it is
filled with authors that might be considered ‘disorienting,’ but the theatre knows and goes about
a relatively successful business. Why is that and what lessons are there for the humanities and
liberal arts?
Granted that the theatre has experimented broadly with “happenings” and “audience
experiences” for the last forty to fifty years, still its mainstay – one that draws audiences –
remains “classic works” or works that, at least, seem aware of the potentials of the dramatic and
theatrical inheritance. The theatre is simply filled with people who are immersed in these two
complementary traditions. Also, theatre people know that they are “live.” In Hume’s terms, they
are vivacious. The audience, because it is assembled, is live; the actors have voices and gestures
whose timbre and sweep are, by and large, authentic and inescapable. The theatre can assemble
its considerable range of artists, its stage, with its focus of audience attention, and its vivid here
and now-ness to achieve – what? It is, of course, true to think that theatre is entertainment. But
to “entertain” is to consider and, potentially, when you go to a theatre, you could be asked to use
your heart and mind for a wide range of forms stretching over the spectacle of props and
choreography, the music of an orchestra to the whistle of a lonely character exiting the stage, the
language of the streets or Shakespeare, arguments ranging from physics and philosophy to
persuasions of a lover, human character choices and suffering that make a difference to how we
�feel about those characters, and conceptual or actional frameworks where we have a minisystem, mini-world or mini-verse before us.
Theatre people seem, by and large, not to conceive of accessibility to this range as a
dumbing down or as too plebian to warrant attention. The problem is not Shakespeare’s because
he was great in his Elizabethan vocabulary and iambs or complex in his plots, nor the audience’s
because it simply isn’t expert enough or intellectually rigorous enough to appreciate technical
nuance, but the production company’s – how will they make the language convey what
Shakespeare was using it for? Presentation in the theatre isn’t a matter of democracy – it is a
matter of availability. Presentation is a matter of welcoming in a controlled, focused manner so
that those who are drawn to theatre (or any other art form) are helped to partake of what it has to
offer. Availability, then, is the use of the theatrical arts to make intelligible the dramas
presented.
There’s an attractive orientation, here, that perhaps churches, museums, orchestras and
the humanities could all take a lesson from, and the orientation’s attractiveness rests in art. Art
and artistic structure is the phenomenon that is shared by museums, orchestras, to some degree
churches, and certainly the humanities. We recognize this phenomenon in two different ways:
obviously, so-called fine arts products and activities are central, but equally important and just as
nuanced are the argumentative and symbolic arts, exemplified by the liberal arts, that are used to
apprehend and appreciate the fine arts. For the humanities, whatever completion the historical
draw of politics and culture (as a substitute for politics) may offer, the fact is that art is
quintessential, since the humanities would cease to exist and would have no history whatsoever
if art did not exist.
�And the same is true of liberal education. Humanities departments and, through them,
colleges are far more aligned to theatre, museums, and orchestras than they are to the physical or
social science departments or research facilities. The recent, much discussed, Harvard white
paper on the humanities wants the history of the humanities to begin, more or less, with the rise
of universities, which, in turn, become the home of scientific and humanistic disciplines after the
Enlightenment. But, before the rise of universities and, then, a humanism separated from the
sciences, the arts and humanities were intertwined by the liberal arts of the Greco-Roman and, to
a more limited extent, the early Christian and Middle-Ages worlds. Foundational to humanistic
study is not discrete disciplinarity, but artistic capacity, scope, and performance. Put differently,
liberal education without art is simply not liberal education, for, without it, liberal education’s
“freedom” has little room for invention, its examinations of disciplines will be confined to stock
rehearsals of accepted postulates, and, as it has, it will lose a position, largely aesthetic, from
which to criticize current political debate of any stripe. In recognizing the centrality of arts, for
the humanities what is at stake is what constitutes the fields of the humanities; for liberal
education the claim that colleges offer a liberal arts education is at stake.
The vivacity of the theatre can be captured in the humanistic classroom, but not through
technological gee-whiz nor some sort of ‘theatrical’ staging effects. Nor is it likely to be
captured in lectures. Notwithstanding the times all academics have marveled in remembering the
lecture a professor gave, lectures are not “made to be performed” in the way dramas are. Put
differently, if a professor cannot figure out how to “perform” an idea, then she or he will have to
resort to other means. The seeming absence of performance instruction has important
implications for focusing the thought of humanities students through pedagogy. The arts of
grammar, rhetoric and logic, dialectic, interrogation and conversation, arts of interpretation, of
�meaning, and of a specific artistic appreciation (e.g. knowing scales in music, perspective in the
visual arts, prosody in literature, specific differentiated forms of imitative and inquiry literatures)
take on enormous importance. Such arts suggest a partnership of artists in the classroom, not
unlike that of playwright and performers in the theatre. Not only must the professors generally
employ these arts in the (relative) absence of stage props, choreography, performed musical
scores, oral interpretation, and, especially, acting, but the students themselves will have to learn
to employ them because there is little or no staging that they can rely on.
Some canaries in the cage of higher education are chirping loudly that no arts like these
are any longer being learned on today’s campuses. Verlyn Klinkeborg, member of the editorial
board of the New York Times, has taught at many top flight colleges and universities. In an
essay on the “Decline and Fall of the English Major,” he notes that the “kind of writing – clear,
direct, humane – and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities,” but
that students, today, cannot produce clear writing. He adds, brutally, “the humanities do a bad
job of teaching the humanities” largely because “writing well used to be a fundamental principle
of the humanities…” [my emphasis] Of course, the problems of the humanities are more general
than problems of the English major. And here is where the shoe really begins to pinch. Arum
and Roksa’s Academically Adrift found in national samplings that “three semesters of college
education … have a barely noticeable impact on students’ skills in critical thinking, complex
reasoning, and writing.” xv Controlling for socio-economic background doesn’t improve the
picture. Worse, Blaich and Pascarella found in a national study of 11 liberal arts colleges and 6
universities where the kind of practices that tend to be recommended to improve scores are
employed – e.g., discussion groups, peer groups, working across disciplines, imagining an
argument from someone else’s point of view – the capacities of students for moral reasoning and
�critical thinking on average “increased only a small amount” over four years. xvi
Positive
attitude toward literacy declined in 53% of all students, two-thirds of students during four years
reported declines in academic motivation, and interest in “contribut[ing]” to both the arts and
sciences declined for twice as many students as those that experienced growth in interest. One
might think that college can only affect such measures marginally, but, no, it turns out that
practically the same measures indicated large advances by undergraduate students in the 1980s.
As Arum and Roksa put it, “low gains…are…not simply an artifact of our measurement strategy,
but a disconcerting reality.” (37)
Let’s be clear. The data doesn’t say that no students improve significantly in moral and
critical reasoning or writing ability. Some do, but not nearly enough. Upon graduation,
apparently few students want to make contributions to the arts and sciences, but some do. Some
are still academically motivated. Still, the data does say that by our own lights there is both a
problem and an opportunity for the humanities and liberal arts education. Arum and Roksa make
it very clear that, generally, time on the task of studying, and specifically far more reading and
writing than is the usual practice in our colleges and universities, improves student learning (131
and 132).
So what might students take time to read or artfully produce? As Executive Director of
ACTC, I am a strong proponent of using classical works, but I have come to believe, especially
with regard to questions of students working across disciplines or inventing arguments, that a
more capacious view of what counts in classical works would reward our students. After
reviewing more than 50 general education programs, including many core text, great books
programs, and after having approved over 2000 paper proposals for our ACTC conferences over
20 years, I find it disturbing that philosophical or theoretical -- in the Greek sense -- discussions
�of art and appreciation of some of the technical development entailed have virtually disappeared
from coherent general education curricula and discussions at ACTC. There is the Platonic
exception, but works of Aristotle, Isocrates, Cicero, Augustine, Priscian, or, moving forward,
Bruni, Petrarch, or Erasmus, on grammar, rhetoric and logic are largely absent from core text,
general liberal education programs. Nor is it better when we get to the moderns: no Saussure,
Burke, Austin, Smullyan, and so forth. Sure, there are courses with these texts and authors, and
there are professors who teach these arts in isolated courses, but we don’t teach across the
curriculum these liberal arts texts that contain the questions and techniques that would make the
liberal arts truly available to all.
Great or Big Questions may be asked in general education programs, but I can assure you
that “What is Art?” is rarely among these in any systematic way. xvii Since we offer bachelor-ofarts degrees, the chance meeting of this question seems particularly disturbing because it
comprehends other fascinating questions that the liberal arts raise and that scholarship has
pointed out. Questions of perception, aesthetics, imitation, elements of speech, separations and
relations of language to the physical, psychological and conventional worlds, available modes of
interpretation, the relations of the origin of language to the divine and civilizational origins of
our humanity, not to mention questions of equity, justice, the nature of truth and the
determination or freedom of thought are not only pointed out by scholars, but directly observable
in such liberal arts texts by our undergraduate students. xviii Indeed, taken very seriously, the
liberal arts question, “what is art,” will lead to examinations and reformulations of whole
disciplines, as Henry Adams illustrated in The Education of Henry Adams. xix But we don’t teach
across the curriculum the liberal arts texts that I indicated that contain the questions and
techniques that would make the liberal arts truly available to all. xx Again, I repeat, in isolated
�courses all of the arts, questions, and texts can be found. In some isolated institutions, the
bachelor-of-arts degree is more artistic. But, comprehensively, in the current structural situation
of the university and collegiate education, the humanities are probably our chief source of hope
for an education in the arts which reaches all students systematically. The question is whether a
humanistic liberal arts education is desirable.
I think it is. Teaching distinguishable liberal arts are to the vivacity of human
achievements as the arts of the stage are to the liveliness and intelligibility of drama. That is,
what arts are used and the proportions of their use, the recognition that art in its largest sense is
the object of study, is central to focusing the mind of students in the humanities. Conversely,
the proper production by students from the humanistic point of view is conversation with fellow
students and teachers, the essay, formal speeches and debates, video, audio, and web
productions, musical performance, stage performance, oral interpretations, original translations,
poems, stories, and conversational defenses or explanations of one’s work. And these artful
productions suggest that the term “undergraduate research” does not necessarily point to,
inculcate, require or comprehend the pedagogy or use of any of these other arts.
At stake in the classroom interaction between books, essays, works of fine arts and the
corresponding liberal arts students employ is the realization of the possibilities, the intellectual
freedom, which humans make for themselves, not only in the past but for a future. That is, we
can no more know the truth about human existence or beyond without examining the possibilities
found in products and performances of art, than we can know the possibilities of human
existence or beyond simply by possessing the truth. We must work out both and get better or
worse in doing so.
�The argument above seems to preclude the scholarly nature of book and article
publishing in the humanities – the artifact of research that many humanists hold most dear. But
not really. Literate audiences were small in ancient times. As literacy has spread, generally,
products of art such as play scripts, and their cinematic versions, became widely distributed –
think of the motivation for the publication of Shakespeare’s folio -- whereas humanistic
publication has shrunk and sunk into academic libraries and tiny, specialized audiences. This is
a mistake we are paying for. We need, instead, a vigorous public scholarship.
If time permitted, I would elaborate three examples of public scholarship. Here, I’ll
simply allude to the specifics they offer. They involve transmission, interpretation, criticism,
and invention – four functions basic to liberal arts efforts to inculcate freedom. Their order
marks increasingly wider freedom in liberal education.
Our first example is a recent article in the New Republic by Helen Vendler. xxi She argues
that the recent digitalization of Emily Dickenson manuscripts has revealed that “perhaps, for
Dickinson, the principal unit of thought in poetic composition was sometimes not the stanza, not
even the line, but the individual word.” Her liberal-arted, scholarly defense of Dickenson’s
poetry within the traditions of grammar has real consequences, because she raises for our
students the pedagogical question, “can you think of a better word, here?” She makes clear the
intellectual, emotive and formal advantages of such an education in artistic making, but we can
add that such repeated exercises would move in the direction of building precision in vocabulary
and perception, as well as a sense of reasoned choice, while appreciatively reading a great core
text author. That’s a lot of bang for your buck.
The second example belongs to Roland Barthes. He originally published “The World of
Wrestling” in 1957 in Espirit, a literary magazine founded in the 30’s. xxii In “Wrestling” Barthes
�invokes a knowledge of Greek philosophy and drama, as well as French classical theatre. Still,
this comic, ironic essay is intelligible to any student, now, because the modern, media-promoted
versions of American wrestling have enough in common with the French wrestling hall of 1957
to allow for understanding that, ultimately, reaches back to earlier art forms. Barthes’ careful
extraction of devices of meaning via the staging of matches -- devices such as the utterly
catastrophic “forearm smash” against the chest of the opponent – indicates how the audience is
led to experience a match, a “spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice,” as a
“Natur[al]…understanding of things,” rather than the constructed understanding it is. Given
sufficient examples in a curriculum of liberal arts texts, students would see that mark of
humanistic liberal arts – recurrent use – and, thereby a range of intellectual choices open to them.
For the analytic construction and deconstruction of art by critics of the 20th Century recovered
that movement of Greek arts between the development of a poetics of whole works and the
rhetorical handbooks of separable topics, extracted from works, designed to lead to future
compositions.
Finally, J. L. Austin delivered, at university and on BBC radio, lectures which became
the work, How To Do Things with Words. Born out of philosophical work with descriptive
sentences which could be subjected to scrutiny on questions of truth or falsity as logical
statements (1-2), Austin’s concern is to distinguish and elaborate a class of utterances which are
performative, not descriptive, xxiii where we can say accurately and truthfully that someone is
“doing...an action” (5-7, 13). I will not state the analysis of his six conditions for recognizing
performative statements that leads me to the conclusion that in his own terms to perform a play,
to read a poem or any literate text is “doing an action.” xxiv But I would point out that play
scripts are instructions for performance to a director, actor, and the entire company – and if those
�artists don’t act as fully as they can with their own arts, you know that production has failed. In
this sense, Austin’s work is germane to knowing, perhaps even assessing, when we are acting in
a liberal-arted fashion, for the theatrical point is generalizable to all works of art: each of them
are potentially instructions on how to read a work, but only the unusually gifted are likely to read
a work well without actualizing liberal arts to guide them, any more than one is likely to sing or
speak well on stage without having had phonetic and interpretive voice training. That is, in
choosing to examine and use, or not use, the liberal arts, we choose performatively to read a
work well, artfully, habitually, spontaneously, or badly.
If our students do well, artfully, what then would persons who hold a bachelor-of-arts
look like – independently from a major? First, they would have the character of an artist, a free,
liberal one at that. They would think about art and be able to demonstrate such thought by
exercising a capacity for generating works of the intellect and imagination, ranging between truth
and possibility, which captured their own and others’ souls. They would know how to listen,
look and read with an attention and respect for the work and voices of others. They would
properly believe, because the belief belonged to their experience, that contributing to and making
artistic productions would involve cooperation, planning, foresight, reasoned choice, and their
own plain, disciplined hard work with others. They would have at their command a ready
technology of production, appeals, reasoning and expression which could be put at the service of
themselves, their families, corporations, non-profits and associations, governments, and
international organizations, and they would also possess a technology of the mind which they
could summon to think about ideas and ideals, now and in the future. They would have the
experience of their own immediate culture and the reasoned possession of traditions of the West
and other major cultures over a range of disciplines and formed works, and their experience and
�possession of tradition would be a resource for them to draw upon in almost any contingency.
They would have ways to analyze, translate, communicate, analogize, question, and invent
experience for themselves and others. They would be able to examine science, art, politics,
business and economic affairs, religion, culture, communities, neighborhoods, families and
friends with an eye to human passions and the confidence, charity, faith and hope that belongs to
those who hold the future. They would be able to discriminate when to make, to act, and to
contemplate, and when each was best and when it was not. Finally, they would know how to
look out upon the achievements of humanity to discover, with wonder and appreciation, not only
how to bring their vision of a liberal arts education to a wider public, but what a precious thing
our humanity is. No one discipline can build either such a character or offer such a degree, but a
humanistic liberal arts education can. xxv
The humanities have one primary job: to make available, by focusing the mind of
students in and out of the university, works of art and intellect that a crafted, intellectual heritage
of the West and other traditions of the world have transmitted. The liberal arts are the most
substantive way by which to make these inheritances available for inquiry and examination.
Philosophy, Religion, Politics, Economics, Culture, Science and everything else follows,
sometimes simultaneously, after that. A core text core which includes examination of the liberal
arts as such does all this. If the humanities really pay attention to art, then they will look to the
artistic reasons why theatre is not failing in a world where cultural institutions seem on the verge
of crumbling. If they do, not only the humanities, but liberal arts education will be better off.
�i
Versions of this paper have been delivered at the Transylvania Seminar (summer 2015) and at St. John’s
College, Santa Fe, as part of its conference on What Are the Liberal Arts For? (fall 2015). This version
incorporates, here, a modified version of the opening paragraphs of “Enriching Liberal Education’s Defense in
Universities and Colleges: Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē,” appearing in St. John’s Review, fall 2015.
ii
Andrew Delbanco hardily approves of Tony Kronman’s great books curriculum for the ideas it raises, and
he cites the artes liberales ideal of education that Bruce Kimball has extensively documented as a tradition of
aristocratic European liberal learning that opens the mind, but America’s “attempt to democratize” that through its
collegiate educations is what interests him (College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton University Press,
2012, 33.) “Working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive,” Delbanco, in an extensive analysis of the past
and present social conditions of colleges as institutions, ultimately locates the “universal value of a liberal
education” in the belief, derived from the 19th Century religious college, that “no outward mark – wealth or poverty,
high or low social position, credentials or lack thereof – tells anything about the inward condition of the soul” (171).
He transmutes this belief, today, into a liberal education which in its “saving power… ignites in one another a sense
of the possibilities of democratic community” through “the intellectual and imaginative enlargement [college] makes
possible” (172). He concludes, “we owe it to posterity to preserve and protect this institution. Democracy depends
on it.” Martha Nussbaum begins her “manifesto” in defense of the humanities and arts with a crisis in which “the
humanities and the arts are being cut away in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually
every nation in the world.” This entails “discarding of skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.” In the
survival of the humanities and arts within educational institutions “the future of the world’s democracies” is said to
“hang in the balance” (Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Hunamanities. Princeton University Press, 2010,
1-2).
Notwithstanding a very serious concern with “ideals of freedom,” Tony Kronman is less focused on the
links between democracy and liberal education, than on the links between the humanities and our culture
(Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Caravan, copyright
Anthony Kronman, 2007.) He focuses particularly on the humanities’ abandonment, within colleges and
universities, of a search for meaning in our individual lives and our scientific culture’s way of aggrandizing our
technical powers without placing them within human limits, human finitude. The combination, he believes, yields a
kind of spiritual desiccation. Oddly similar to Kronman notwithstanding published differences with him, Patrick
Deneen indicates that since the Enlightenment, greatness seems to rest in transformation, whereas before the rise of
the New Sciences, whose advocates wrote “modern” books battling ancient books, greatness rested in a
“predominant understanding” of cultivated endurance, an acceptance of natural or created limits to human powers,
knowledge, and ambitions. The modern great book program contains many scientific, political and economic works
which support the idea of transformation. So Deneen asks, might there be an alternative way to think about the core
texts of the ancient to medieval Western tradition, ultimately as a way of restraining our scientifically-released
pleonexia in mastering, in transforming our world? He suggests great books might be justified by recovering this
earlier understanding’s humility (In First Things, “Against Great Books,” January 2013, 35.)
Reinhard Hütter, sharing many of Deneen’s concerns with technological (Baconian) transformations,
argues for Newman’s understanding of enlargement of the mind by liberal education as an end for its own sake. The
modern state has provided pseudo-ends for the university and defenses of it share the common conviction that
management of the scientific enterprise toward ‘progress’ will solve political/cultural problems; the current
university is that organ for management (1019). Liberal education, based on a search for ultimate truths, is set in
opposition to a “techne” knowledge gained in the late modern university…” (1022). Two arguments demand
reformulation via a theological search for the truth: (1) almost all of the research functions of this techne could be
relocated to other institutional organs (businesses, medical labs, and military-industrial complexes; 1022) and (2)
even if the machinery keeps going it threatens to subject to production the nature of humans and, possibly, the
existence of the whole human species (1040). Liberal education provides, at least, a check, “a critical examination
of its own operative beliefs and a vision of the whole.” “University Education, the Unity of Knowledge—
and (Natural) Theology: John Henry Newman’s Provocative Vision,” in Nova et Vetera 11, 4, 2014.
iii
Not for Profit, 133.
iv
Op cit. (95). Apparently, literature does not rise to “breakthroughs.”
v
At one point, Kronman and Deneen come very close to saying, and meaning, the same thing. Kronman’s case for
the humanities in large part rests on controlling technology through a recognition of human limits: “We have a
desire for control that can never be satisfied by any degree of control we actually achieve. We always want more….
This is the human condition, which is characterized by our subjection to fateful limits that we can neither tolerate
nor do without…. The most important thing about technology is not what it does but what it aspires to do. …
�Technology encourages us to believe that the abolition of fate should be our goal… Technology discourages the
thought that our finitude is a condition of the meaningfulness of our lives… It makes the effort to recall our limits
and to reflect upon them seem less valuable and important.” (230-233) For Kronman, the research ideal is, of
course, partly justified in the sciences by the “fruit” – both in discovery and in technology – that it produces: “The
research ideal is today the organizing principle of work in every academic discipline…In the natural sciences, the
research ideal has proved remarkably fruitful. The new discoveries that pour from our college and university
laboratories every and the clear sense of progressive movement toward an objective understanding of the structure
and mechanisms of the natural world testify to the productive fit between the natural sciences and the modern
research ideal…” Whereas in the humanities “understanding,” not discovery or production, but not a productive
technology characterizes research results: “In the humanities…the benefits of research are less uniform or certain”
(130-133). “…research in the humanities has produced results of lasting value. It has added importantly to our
understanding of the historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical subjects with which the humanities deal…” The
demands for specialization and for teaching to that specialization ought to be less insistently felt in the humanities:
“What must be resisted is the imperial sprawl of the research ideal, its expansive tendency to fill every corner of
each discipline in which it takes hold and to color the expectations and judgments of teachers in these disciplines
regarding what they do. Admittedly this is asking a lot…But…it is merely asking for a somewhat greater degree of
humility on the part of those in the humanities who first allegiance is to this ideal…” (248-249).
For Deneen, the (current) point of a philosophy of education is not to admire the world, or suffer its limits,
but to change it, to transform it. That is, since the Enlightenment, greatness seems to rest in transformation. So
Deneen asks, might there be an alternative way to think about and assign terms to the core texts of the Western
tradition, ultimately as a way of restraining our excesses in transforming our world? Deneen begins by accepting a
stasis in the political, moral, religious, and poetic inheritance of books that extends from the ancients through the
first stirrings of modernity: “Great books such as Paradise Lost sought to inculcate a sense of limits,… we could
look at a dominant understanding of a long succession of great books from antiquity to the Middle Ages…to
conform human behavior and aspirations to the natural or created order” (35). By way of Baconian, Cartesian and
Hobbesian repudiation of books, Deneen elaborates the argument which he finds undermines the “human limits”
understanding by turning to discriminate two kinds of liberty. The first, associated with great books, is a “liberty
…of hard-won self-control through the discipline of virtue” which, often, folds into defenses of great books as
matters of preparation for citizenship. The second is a liberty with “the stress …upon the research, creative activity,
scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge” (37). The former constrains our desires, the latter
endlessly satisfies them through “the human project of mastery.” The latter pursuits were justified by the arguments
of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, reinforced by Dewey, which depended on the idea “’that a larger number of
natural forces and objects [could be or] have been transformed into instrumentalities of action’” in the West than in
cultures which did not exploit the natural resources available through scientific technology (36). Deneen concludes
that we do need to teach these two competing notions of liberty through the great books, but defenders should
exchange the notion of “greatness” for a notion of “humility” derived from the earlier works of the intellectual
tradition represented in the West (38). Humility might, then, restrain our excesses of transformation.
For Hütter the humanities provides no hope since there are unbridgeable epistemic disagreements within
the humanities that would forestall a move toward a unified curriculum, and with their reliance on promoting the
imagination, in preference to the abstraction by the intellect, were the cultivation of the imagination to form a
unified end, this would be necessary but insufficient for a full operation of the intellect. It is here that Hütter comes
closest to discussing the arts in so far as these are material aids to asking “life questions.” But the consequence of
such questioning is a pluralism of views with no way to reconcile them (1050-1051). A conflicted, not unified, self
is all that is produced.
vi
Huetter’s program is based on an epistemic ‘enlargement of the mind’ as prescribed by Newman.
vii
Op. cit. 109.
viii
Delbanco, in a discussion that contrasts the sciences to the humanities, lands upon the mimicry that the
humanities have had of the sciences for over 200 years in formulating the fields (e.g., ‘scientific linguistics’ or
‘searching for historical laws’) and, more recently, in adopting computerized ‘distant reading programs’ that, as
research, have little to do with reasons undergraduates attend colleges. Most interesting, here, is that Delbanco
offers no humanistic liberal education technē, that is techniques, as a part of the contrast. Instead, ‘preserving
truth,’ denying ‘the very idea of truth,’ or answering the questions “how to shape a life or how to face death” are
the contrasted to technology. If there is any elaboration of a humanistic technē or art, here, it is an attempt ‘to
�state the value of such an education’ in its component abilities to ‘contract space and time’ or to ‘speak to us in a
subversive whisper that makes us wonder whether the idea of progress might be a sham.” (93-101).
ix
Hütter, it should be acknowledged, seems to have an end in view for the university which is derived, in part, from
its historical and functional search for truth. But this is still a ‘practical’ argument because (a) he wants to reform
an institution and (b) he grounds his justifications (in part) on the threat that technology provides. It is the latter
which provide urgency for the former, even if his solution is or appears to be epistemic or theological.
x
An important set of terms and argument connects technē to the equally important and differential term, mimesis,
and thus power and poetics. “… a bed or a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations –
i.e. in so far as they are products of art – have no innate impulse to change” (Phys. II 1, 192b 18) And, “Where a
series has a completion, all the preceding steps are for the sake of that…and generally art partly completes what
nature cannot bring to a finish, and partly imitates her” (8, 199a 15). Imitation differentiates the arts, particularly
as products, but so do the steps, incorporating means, materials and manner of use, anyone one of which might be
natural, completing the products which don’t exist in nature as a result of these processes. This implies spectra of
arts and imitation. The scope of imitation is confined to the arts in Aristotle (unlike Plato) (see R. P. McKeon, “The
Concept of Imitation in Antiquity,” in R.S. Crane, Critics and Criticism, U. Chicago Press, 1952. The article, in
respect of Aristotle, has long informed this writer’s thinking, but its purpose was, perhaps, informed by a concern,
at the time, to differentiate the modern study of literature (and art) from historical and concurrent studies in
terms of ethics, religion, civilizations. Following Aristotle, questions of particular form(s) and matter(s) become
important within this section of McKeon’s article. The net effect of the section on Aristotle is to differentiate him
from Plato by showing two things: how relatively restricted the concept of imitation was (essentially to things
made by humans) and how Aristotelian distinctions in the arts actually made considerations of the arts, qua arts,
as something that Plato could not do. Changes in critical and cultural fashion have turned the appreciative
situation on its head; now, in order not to reduce art (and liberal arts education) to some other more important
function, it becomes desirable to think of the range and scope of Aristotelian arts and artistic terms as a way to
expand what liberal arts education can do and can articulate.
xi
This contemplation of thought in the Rhetoric seems to partake of the wider possibilities of the soul reflecting on
its own thought that appears in the De Anima: III, 4 of his De Anima (430a2–9): “Thought is itself thinkable
in exactly the same way as its objects are. For in the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what
is thought are identical; for speculative knowledge and its object are identical.” Cited in “University Education, the
Unity of Knowledge—and (Natural) Theology: John Henry Newman’s Provocative Vision” by REINHARD
HÜTTER. In Nova et Vetera, 11, 4, 2013; 1050.
xii
Judith H. Dobrznski, “High Culture Goes Hands-On,” New York Times, August 10, 2013. This particular article included the
‘installation’ of a slide between floors of a museum. Obviously, some installations, whether contemplative or not, are serious
works of art. See for example, Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Philip Kennicott, “America’s
Orchestras are in Crisis: How an effort to popularize classical music threatens to undermine what makes orchestras great.”
New Republic, August 25, 2013. The latter position was rebutted in an August 30th reply by Jesse Rosen, but for purposes of
this article, what mattered was the apparent agreement by these two authors that artistic works were central to recovery.
Roxanna Popescu, “Letter from San Diego: Endangered Opera.” Paris Review, May 12, 2014. This article laments the closing of
opera – that hybrid of theatre and orchestras – in San Diego, and Orange County, Baltimore, Cleveland and New York City and
makes some of the linkages between the failure of the arts and the failure of the humanities made in this paper.
xiii Laurie Goldstein, “Francis Has Changed American Catholic’s Attitudes, but Not Their Behavior, a Poll Finds.” NYTimes,
12/15/2012. “The poll showed that church attendance had not shifted in the past year, with 40 percent saying they had
attended Mass at least weekly”; Ross Douthat, “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?” NYTimes, 7/14/2012. “Yet instead of
attracting a younger more open-minded demographic..., the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace… In the last
decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw a churchgoing
increase”; http://archive.episcopalchurch.org/documents/ASA_by_ProvinceDiocese2000-2010.pdf; John S. Dickerson, “The
Decline of Evangelical America.” NYTimes, 12/15/2012, “In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church
leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church
leaders from any other country… Studies from established evangelical polling organizations – LifeWay Research,… and the
Barna Group – have found that a majority of young people raised as evangelicals are quitting the church, and often the faith,
entirely.” Self-reported attendance probably masks further disaffection: Michael Paulson, “Americans Claim to Attend Church
Much More Than They Do.” NYTimes, 3/6/2014. Different polling methods, designed to detect ‘social desirability bias,’ suggest
that as much as 43 percent of people “acknowledged rare attendance” at church, a higher percentage than is usually suggested
by customary self-reporting methods.
�Reported drops in humanities majors (see the Harvard report, below) at prominent universities, cut backs of programs at
public universities, steep declines in giving to baccalaureate private institutions, and long-term declines in the number of
private liberal arts colleges (see Kimball, below), have produced a question about the health of humanistic liberal arts education
in the last three to four years. What might be at stake in questioning that health is the subject of this paper. Jinjoo Lee,
“Concerns About Job Market Lead Students to STEM Majors,” The Cornell Daily Sun, 2/25/2014, reports that in 2011 “the
percentage of students with a humanities major” dropped 10% and has only recovered 1% point since then. Gordon Hutner
and Feisal G. Mohamed, “The Real Humanities Crisis Is Happening at Public Universities.” The New Republic, 9/6/2013. This
article analyzes the new models of education, whether found in universities or in the federal government, that work against
sustaining the humanities: “Under this new business model, humanities programs suffer in general and small departments, like
classics and philosophy, find themselves perpetually under threat, no matter what their historical significance to higher
learning.” Daniel de Vise, Washing Post, 5/ 13/2011, “At St. John’s, a Defender of the Liberal Arts.” Though St. John’s later
successfully reversed its application totals, the economic crises saw a decline in applications “from 460 in 2008 to 357 in 2010.”
Scott Jaschik, “Contributions to Colleges Drop 12%.” Inside Higher Ed, 2/3/2010. Declines in giving to private colleges were the
most severe, except for community colleges (which derive a much higher percentage of their income from governments).
“John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, said he wasn't surprised that the
numbers were down, but that the depth of the decline was a surprise. ‘We're in unprecedented territory,’ he said, both
because of the severity of the economic difficulties and the volatility of campus conditions.”
xv Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press,
2011, 35.
xvi Charles Blaich and Ernest Pascarella. http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/storage/4-year-change-summary-website.pdf, p. 3.
These are 2006 results but the authors seem to find a continuum between Arum and Roska’s 2011 work and their original
study.
xvii We are dealing in generalities. Yale’s Directed Studies program has an explicit (fine) arts program; Concordia University—
Irvine’s new core program does raise the question with students, “What is art?”
xviii E.g., Richard P. McKeon, “Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago School of Criticism,” Profession, 1982, 1-17. Howard
Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 1983. Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient
Legacy and Its Humanist Reception. 1997.
xix On Adams: see particularly the chapters of the book which begin after 1890. It is important to note that a disguised comic
reversal in Adams’ intellectual interest appears earlier in the book, when he discusses his work for his father in England during
the Civil War. The period was one of great tension and it appeared as if Great Britain would side with the South. Adams
discovers the real motives of the government in publications around 1890, and this changes his view of what history is. His first
step (after the reversal) is to begin to consider the new technologies of science in relation to the figure of the Virgin Mary in the
12th Century. In a real liberal arts “move,” he begins to think of her as a symbol drawing human “energy” toward her. The
story of his own development, then, becomes the culmination of his “Education,” a liberal arts reconsideration of history.
xx Thus, most of the texts mentioned above are great, or at least, important; their conceptions and operations of art are
essential to any understanding of the works, including those of science, that are read in liberal arts education or, frankly, an
understanding of the way the world really operates. Yet, the smaller the liberal arts, core text program, the more direct
discussion of liberal arts and their formulations are forced out, and the curricular situation resembles that described by
Aristotle at the end of On Sophistical Refutations: “For the training given by paid professors…was like the treatment of the
matter by Gorgias. For they used to hand out speeches to be learned by heart…supposing that [the] arguments on either side
generally fell among them.” Thus, fine art works, in liberal arts programs, become not examples of art, but vehicles to
questions and issues while it is supposed that students learn to read and write in this way.
There is a quasi-exception to the statement above excluding teaching of liberal arts to all students. Concordia
University—Irvine has a Core Philosophy I course in which “elementary statement logic” is taught. Unpublished manuscript,
“The Core Logic Unit: An Imaginative Approach to Reasoning,” Susan Buchanan. ACTC 20th Annual Conference, April 11, 2014.
xxi Helen Vendler, “Vision and Revision: How Emily Dickinson Actually Wrote Her Poems.” New Republic, March 24, 2014, p. 48.
For a skeptical view on the value of the digital collection, see Angie Mlinko, “Infamy or Urn?” The Nation, Jan. 27, 2014, 31-32.
xiv
xxii
Collected into his 1957 publication, Mythologies.
Or, better, “constative.”
xxiv (a) use of conventional procedures; (b) appropriate of persons and circumstances for invoking the procedure; (c and d)
correct and complete execution of the procedure; (e) the corresponding feelings and thoughts that the convention invokes,
intentionally used in the conduct indicated by the utterance; and (f) the appropriate conduct.
xxv The arts have a history of being woven into the fabric of education for over 2000 years, in both the West and the East. One
of the marks of arts, particularly one that came to be seen as one of the liberal arts, rhetoric, for both Plato and Aristotle was
that it should be able to give an account of itself, to offer systematic reasons for its operations, both how and why they work.
(Gorgias, 465d, 504d, Rhetoric 1. I, 1354. 10). An added, serious account of a liberal arts education, as an arts education rather
xxiii
�than a political or quasi-spiritual education, would enrich our own accounts to ourselves and to the outside world of what it is
we know, do and make.
�
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Cultural institutions, theatre, and humanistic liberal arts education : where do we go from here?
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Drew Leder –
I want to focus on lifelong learning not for myself alone, but primarily for men and
women I have met along the way – many of whom were lifers. This story begins in 1992
at the Maryland Penitentiary. I had decided to step outside of the pirvileged environment
of Loyola University to bring my skill-set, limited as it was – philosopher, educator – to
students whose access to these things was limited. I started volunteer teaching in what
was the oldest continuously operating penitentiary in the Western world, situated in
downtown Baltimore. At the time it served as the men’s maximum security prison for all
of the state of Maryland. It is the oldest continuously operating prison in the Western
World – having opened its doors – or maybe I should say shut them – first in 1811. I
started with 15-20 of the most motivated men from the inmate population. We read about
Socrates’ trial in The Apology, the stoicism of Epictetus, -- a crippled Roman slave -- and
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, call for justice in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Most of the
inmates were serving life, or double-life, or life plus 20, strange concepts unless you’re a
believer in reincarnation. They weren’t going anywhere so neither was I. That class
continued some 18 months, a luxury you don’t have inside a university setting.
There was also a passion you don’t always see at a place like Loyola. We there,
faculty and students alike, are used to taking the liberal arts for granted.. To study history,
literature, philosophy, theology, and on and on, ho-hum. It can seem not a privilege to be
deeply valued, but at least for our Loyola students, almost a prison sentence to be served.
Four years of hard labor finishing the core curriculum, and major-requirements, until
release is finally won in the form of a diploma.
1
�How very different was the attitude of the inmates! For them the liberal arts was
their release. Even while under severe bodily confinement, the spirit could take flight,
soaring and sweeping through the heavens.
Dwelling in a world of ideas, the inmates were better able to disconnect from the
harshness around them – the bars and barbed wire of a maximum security prison. But
finally, our work was not primarily about disconnecting, but reconnecting. The inmates
needed to reconnect with all those things within themselves that life in the inner city, and
in prison, had obscured. Who am I, beyond my identity as a drug dealer, a criminal, a
tough guy? What happened to that innocent child I once was – is he still in there
somewhere, and dare I let him out? What is life all about now that I’m serving a life
sentence? What went wrong in my past? How can my future be different? How can I be
useful? How can I be happy? How can I control my inner demons and contact my inner
angels?
Such questions were not merely intellectual (though intellectual they were). Your
very life was riding on the answers adopted – your emotional, social, and spiritual life,
and on the streets, and in prison, sometimes your physical life.
Our class conversations proved so powerful that I began to tape and transcribe
them, and they formed the basis for a book, The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on
Life, Death, and Hope (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). I want to quote a little from a
letter I received a letter from Donald Thompson, Sr., one of the participants in that
project, and serving life plus 100 years for armed robbery, attempted murder, and murder
in the first degree. Its important that not just I get to speak hear today, but the voices,
even the images of the prisoners, so that they can escape all the bars and barbed wire, the
endless prison time, and circulate a little among us in freedom. Donald writes:
2
�As I am wont, I commence this missive by evoking the peace and blessing of God
on both you and your entire family. I, myself am well despite my present plight.
God is good. Out of that goodness he has blessed me with the mental and spiritual
fortitude to cope; however, when I do have my moments of pain, I remember that
the grave-yards are teeming with folks who would gladly have this cell and all the
time too.
To be honest, most of my depression derives from thinking about the
victim in my case. Sometimes I just do not feel worthy of God’s grace because I
took that man’s life. Long ago I went to God and begged for forgiveness: and he
blessed me. Yet I have been unable to forgive myself....I truly appreciate you
affording me a nonjudgmental shoulder on which to lean....
We are at present under a lock-down because two officers were stabbed two
weeks ago. It is very unfortunate that these officers were injured. My heart goes
out to them and their respective families, for I do not condone violence. I am,
nonetheless, not tripping off about the lock-down. It gave birth to this mail you
are perusing. Plus, it forced me to meditate, rest, and reflect. So I have embraced
this situation. I would be blessed if I could somehow incorporate that philosophy
in other aspects of my life.
When I went to God – twenty two years ago – for grace, I made a
covenant to not perpetrate violence again. The fact that I have been able to honor
that commitment is not mere hocus pocus....The thing that deterred me from
violence was a structured environment which was comprised of social programs,
therapeutic programs, educational programs, and the like. These institutions
3
�armed me with the empowering information I needed to honor my covenant. I was
also able to network and bond with folks such as you. And you my friend have
played an integral role in my edification. This is what we need now to curb
violence in and outside the walls. That is, institutions that educate, socialize and
heal. In addition we need ordinary people to attach themselves to these structured
environments. No gang-banger can withstand this transformation juggernaut.
Drew, I do not know how many acts of violence I have prevented by employing
the information I gleaned from these programs and folks like you.…Many of
these programs no longer exist.
Donald’s right: he’s experienced an inward transformation assisted by outward supports.
He’s also right in his last statement: many of the programs to which he refers no longer
exist. Shortly after our course together, a federal anti-crime bill in the closed down
college extension programs in prisons around the country. The 1994 bill rendered inmates
ineligible for Pell Grants, the funds that assist low-income Americans to pay for higher
education. To me, this is not an anti-crime bill, but pro-crime in its effects. Our gettough-on-the-criminal politics has led us to turn away from the very concept of
rehabilitation. Instead, we stuff the prisons ever fuller with what we regard as
unredeemable social refuse. America now locks up over 2.3 million inmates, some 64%
of whom are Hispanic or black. We hold fully one-fourth of the entire world’s prison
population, jailing people at six to eight times the rate of comparable Western countries.
For example, we hold more prisoners in a single state, the state of Texas, than do the
nations of France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Japan, and Singapore all
4
�combined. Some 72% of these prisoners are in for non-violent crimes. It costs over
$30,000 a year to house each one.
We conduct this under the aegis of the Department of Corrections, but do we truly
seek to correct? We lock people in penitentiaries, but do we work to assist them in a
penitential process of self-reflection and change? In most cases, the answer is a
resounding no.
In Plato’s allegory of the cave he portrays prisoners chained so all they can see
are shadows cast on a wall which they take to be real, having no object of comparison.
This is an apt description of many a prison. Those who might bring light in from the
outside world are often sadly absent, with the inmates left to contemplate shadows on a
wall – the contempt of authorities, the society of other criminals, and the memories of a
failed life. Not surprisingly, upon release inmates are often poorly equipped
psychologically, educationally, and occupationally. They also are branded as ex-cons,
which takes away jobs, even housing and voting rights. It has been said the prison system
serves an expensive way of increasing criminal behavior, or at least keeping under
surveillance and restriction large segments of our minority populations.
But there remain the many inmates who also see the prison as a place for
exploration and self-transformation. One of the men I worked with, Charles Baxter, a
Muslim imam, compared the prison not to Plato’s cave, but a “prophet’s” cave. He says,
“Man is created from one cell, right, and as man grows he adapts into another cell, and
that cell’s also a place for growth and evelopment. When you read the Koran and the
Bible, you’ll see that different prophents went to the cave for comfort and iolations. And
cell’s like that cave.” I asked him the size of the kind of cell he was referring to, and to
5
�which he was confined for decades. He said “It’s about the size of a small bathroom in an
old house.”
How do we on the outside support such men in their quest for lifelong learning
and growth? Here are a few things we have done at Loyola over the years. We have run a
book drive to support the prison library system. The funds to purchase books for the
Maryland prison library system has recently been zeroed out by the state – that’s right,
zero. We have helped produce a brochure to support inmates in developing a meditation
practice in prison – over ten thousand have been distributed. We have supported prisoner
writing and research – here, for example, is an autobiographical memoir by a prison,
Arlando Jones, III, who I know as Tray – that has been published by Loyola’s Apprentice
House Press.
Perhaps most importantly, we have continued to run classes in philosophy and the
liberal arts, now at the Jessup Correctional Institution, a newer maximum-security
facility. For a number of years, I have taken in with me service-learning students from
courses I teach at Loyola. The prisoners love the infusion of new energy, and the Loyola
students, participating as co-learners alongside the prisoners, have an experience that
explodes their stereotypes and impresses them deeply. It’s a win-win situation.
As word has gotten out, more and more area faculty have become interested in
volunteering, until this has expanded into a real college-level program, though we give no
credits or degrees. It is called the JCI Scholars Program. We have a menu of about seven
courses offered a semester, with 130 inmates participating. These include many natural
leaders within the prison so I like to think what they learn, and who they become, ripples
through the prison, affecting others and the institution. I know this has all had profound
effects on me, and on my Loyola students. We have been moved by the prisoners’ own
6
�fierce dedication to, and application of, the liberal arts. I too have become a lifelong
learner, educated by lifers.
But I don’t want to end by painting too bright a picture, especially given the
cruelty of our prison sytem. Tray, the author I mentioned, now in his mid-40s, serving
life plus twenty for crimes commited when he was 16 years old, recently wrote me the
following. “I feel that I often fall into moments of despair when I can’t shake my dark
thoughts…I believe I told you in a previous letter that I was beginning to regret my
decision to grow intellectually. Knowledge doesn’t bring the comfort that ignorance does.
If you recall a famous philosopher said, “In life, you get one of two things, knowledge or
tranquility…No one can have both.”
Knowledge, at times, can be a hard thing to live with, when you’re serving
endless time with little chance of release. You’ve built a “new you” – but are stuck with
the crimes the “old you” committed – even if they happened when you were very young.
You live in a culture, which especially for people of color, seems to demand endless
punishment, which many people, communities, and corporations, are profiting from. It is
unlikely that your educational accomplishments will win you early release,.
Still, the liberal arts can free us from inner jails of ignorance and self-defeating
rage. It can help build supportive communities of learning and positive empowerment. It
can help us connect with the greatest minds and spirits who have ever lived. It can
prepare us for life, whether that unfolds inside or outside prison walls. I’m reminded of
all this every other Monday, the day I go to prison.
7
�
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"What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe
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2014-10
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English
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St. John's College Meem Library
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7 pages
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Seeing bars, hearing voices
Description
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Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Drew Leder at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus.
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Leder, Drew
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2016-10-18
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
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text
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pdf
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Education, Humanistic
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English
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24004537