1 20 39 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/71540757a06ff9371bb2c2ade4af4ff8.pdf 61e047c88dc6bce75c822d7595c868f9 PDF Text Text Adventures in Second Sailing (or, Hands-On Learning as Central to a Liberal Arts Education) Kirsten Jacobson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Maine Rainer Maria Rilke once reflected: “Our greatest task is this: to find a written language which can withstand our tears and re-create before us—clear, pure, precise—the beautiful goodbyes of those who sailed the seas” (The Inner Sky, p. 41). Even if you have never gone to sea, I believe that, should you take a moment to imagine a sailor’s parting words to family, friends, a child, or a lover, you will be able to feel at least a hint of the earth-shattering and, alternatingly, exhilarating force of a goodbye that can know no secure promise of a homecoming, a goodbye that juxtaposes the certainty of the now and how one has come to this present with the utter unfathomability of what is to come. What might Rilke be suggesting when he makes the bold and intriguing suggestion that our ultimate task is to find a way to write this goodbye? If such writing is our ultimate task, surely we must no longer be talking about something that only matters to sailors. We must be talking about a goodbye that we all share. I will come back to Rilke’s challenge later, but for the moment, I will turn away from it, for it was only by doing so in my own life that I became able to face the core of such a question more directly. For many years, I have wondered over the vital questions of how we connect with others through language, as well as how our intimate use of language is deeply embedded in our explicit or implicit awareness of our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. And, I have been particularly interested in how meaning is lived and experienced by us in spatially thick terms. My research has focused on the nature of home and dwelling, “disturbed” spatial experiences (such as those found in agoraphobia, anorexia, hypochondria, and spatial neglect), the significance of space in political life, and the spatial roots of memory and identity. 1 �About a decade ago, these interests took on a seemingly idiosyncratic character: I began to wonder after the intensity of a ship’s spatial reality. After nine years of relatively disembodied and meandering nautical musings, I dove head on into this fascination by signing on as a trainee crewmember of the three-masted, square-rigged, sail-training vessel the Picton Castle. Before describing anything specific about this hands-on education into sailing, I want first to paint a fuller picture of what drew me into this fascination. As unsophisticated as it may sound, I was lured into the seafaring world by the Hollywood blockbuster “Master and Commander.” More than any aspect of the film’s plot, its characters, its scenery, or Russell Crowe, I was struck by its emotionally-rich portrayal of the way in which a ship must become a self-sustaining world-untoitself when it cuts its umbilical lines to any given port. Being at port is pointedly not where a ship belongs or is at home; it belongs at sea, cut off, one might think, from the stability, safety, and regularity of terrestrial life. Yet, neither “Master and Commander” nor, more significantly, real life reports of ship-life tend to depict a frightened or cut-off crew; instead, they reveal a functioning microcosmic reality. A ship offers an exceptionally focused model of people working together with one another, their available resources, the elements of nature around them and the predicted as well as chance situations that arise. It was especially fascinating to me that sailors are able not only to work and survive, but also to be at home and often to thrive in an environment—the wide open and often wildly difficult sea—that can seem and often be unfathomable and terrifying. Perhaps as intriguing to me were the notions that such a small space serves as a home to so many people; carries cargo and missives and ideas between places at “opposite ends of the earth”; and has for so much of human history been the platform by which some of the greatest and grandest adventures, explorations, and business ventures have been undertaken. 2 �As my sabbatical year from teaching at the University of Maine approached in 2012, I knew I wanted to continue my phenomenological studies of spatiality and its ability to reveal significant aspects of our existential reality and health, and to do so through an immersive research experience that would help bring to the fore issues that often remain concealed to us owing to their familiarity in our lives. After taking a trial two-week passage up the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada as a sailor-in-training, I determined that the experience of voyaging on a working square-rigged ship would provide an excellent observation ground for continuing my research into spatial experience, the nature of home, existential health, and interpersonal relations. And, so, with only a twinge of academic qualm, I signed onto the Picton Castle for an additional four-month journey throughout the South Pacific as an integral part of my sabbatical research plan. At the start of this adventure, I was quite a competent person: I had been driving a car for over half my life, been living on my own for twenty years, had both a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate, had been teaching philosophy at the university level for eight years, and was very recently tenured at my university. These were and are signs, I believe, of being able to understand and do many significant things. And, yet suddenly, when I stepped aboard the ship, I was a true novice again: never since I was a child had I been in a situation that returned me to such a state of not-knowing, of needing to start at the beginning. I had to learn anew nearly every move I made—from walking on a swell-shifting and often slippery surface to tackling sail setting and the 175-plus lines that must be mastered to do so; from considering the significance of the sky and its multitudinous signs of weather and wind to how to moderate one’s voice on a ship that sometimes required the quietness befitting a workplace with three shifts and sometimes required the bellowing voice required to reach from rigging ten stories aloft down to the deck 3 �below; from how to bathe, wash dishes, and clean clothes using an endless supply of salt water, but limited fresh water to steering a 180 foot-long vessel according to the compass, the wind, or the “landmarks” of the sky above; from moving about at night with the aid of only moon and starlight and the occasional red lamp to fitting into a rigid chain of authority; from sleeping in odd temporal rhythms and physical positions to any dozen upon dozen techniques of ship’s maintenance. In the four months I spent learning the ways and insights of sailors of centuries past, my body and soul and habits of moving about in the world were indelibly changed: I began to become a sailor. This education was not one of books or even of much lengthy discussion: it was an education from doing and being, an education of the hands, limbs, and their successful (and quite regularly mistake-ridden) engagement with the surrounding world. Accustomed in my life as a professor and scholar to learning through the intellectual endeavors of reason and description, I learned aboard the ship that there is nothing like feeling the resistance of the helm under one’s hand, the flow of telltales aloft, the wind upon one’s face and the fill of the sail to help one learn—deep in one’s body—when one has taken a right or a wrong turn. Amongst other practical lessons, at sea, it came palpably home to me that wind and water are indisputably partners, perhaps even closer than that: a system whose parts can never be held apart from one another and still make sense. The human challenge, then, was to discover how to successfully introduce the sailing vessel into this system, and, on a grander scale, how we are to navigate our way through this elemental and human world. Many of Joseph Conrad’s words in The Mirror of the Sea finally came home to me during this adventure; he writes: “Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses, that will not put up with bad art from their masters.” Later, he connects this lesson to the deepest matters of humanity: “All vessels are handled in the same way as far as theory goes, 4 �just as you may deal with all men on broad and rigid principles. But if you want that success in life which comes from the affection and confidence of your fellows, then with no two men, however similar they may appear in their nature, will you deal in the same way. There may be a rule of conduct; there is no rule of human fellowship. To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal with ships” (Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, VIII). Conrad’s insights here and in his many great books are not speculations made at arm’s length, but rather the fruit-filled outpourings of someone who was first a sailor and only much later an author. So, how does this relate to the liberal arts and, given my own launching point today, to the ability to say a “proper goodbye”? Well, to begin, I’ll note that in my experience, it is an understatement to say that the liberal arts are under attack these days. At the University of Maine, I spoke on a panel just this past week about the value of liberal arts in higher education. This topic was not, however, poised as a celebration as it largely is here this week; rather, the topic was one of vital necessity for my university: local financial stakeholders are increasingly seeing the liberal arts as “optional” and as “luxuries.” So, I felt a pressing need on that panel to advocate for the essential role of the living value of the liberal arts. While I’ve never had a moment’s doubt about the value of my relationship with the liberal arts, I’ve noticed that my ability to articulate their significance in “real world terms” was radically amplified by my own move to temporarily leave behind my formal studies in order to head to sea as a sailor—not immediately the place one would imagine the liberal arts to be enacted or celebrated. And yet, there aboard my ship, I felt more palpably than ever that the liberal arts must never be seen merely as matters of dinner party conversation or even classroom discussion, as engaging and enriching as such conversations may be for our lives. The liberal arts are not topics reserved for 5 �conferences, formal studies, or moments of self-reflection; indeed, they are not mere “topics” at all. The liberal arts are practices of action, of deciding upon and making commitments within our everyday lives. If these practices have been developed into fields for study and private or social reflection, it is because they arise from the issues, questions, and activities of our very real and very demanding human lives. I felt this reality every day aboard the ship—whether I was working on the mathematics and celestial navigation involved in charting our course; the physics of setting and trimming sail; the psychology of interpersonal dynamics and chains of authority in tight and demanding quarters; the history, literature, and music of sailors’ adventures gone by; or, the philosophical reflections and wonderment opened up by the wide open sea and the questions it can prompt in us regarding mortality, our hopes, ethics, and what truly matters to us. The ship inspired me daily to livingly engage with such aspects of human reality as the significance and nature of privacy, community, hierarchy, equilibrium, wonder, apprenticeship, eros, work, loneliness, the elements, boredom, communication, becoming, unfathomability, adventure, nature, learning, clothing, skill, beauty, tradition, death, music, embodiment, disappointment, hope, fear, ritual, space, property, responsibility, home, and, truly, so much more. While these themes are wide ranging, they share in common the fact that they are matters of deep human concern; and also that my awareness of and relationship to these living issues were directly and significantly developed through my sailing experience. I was in each case brought to see anew these significant dimensions of everyday human life, and to be able to articulate something I deem important about human life through this unique, and yet utterly relatable undertaking. 6 �I see my nautical adventure and its lessons as a sort of second sailing in my personal, interpersonal, and intellectual life. While Socrates’ second sailing is one that ostensibly turns him toward the intelligible realm, I would equally argue that his turn was not one of leaving “this” palpable world behind. Far from this, we see Socrates again and again moving up the ladder of truth from a deeply engaged and erotic situation within this human world. Socrates does not model for us the life of a disembodied philosopher, a life of an education of the mind alone. Rather, he takes up questions of what seemingly lies beyond from the vantage point of the here and now; he is inspired by his situation, what it demands of its participants, and what, with his guidance, they can open themselves to seeing anew. The image of a “second sailing” comes, as you may already know, from a practical situation sometimes faced in the undertaking of sailing—namely, the loss of wind that can carry a ship forward on its path. If winds cannot fill a ship’s sails adequately enough, sailors may be called upon to use their own bodies and resources to row the ship along its course, and this is their “second sailing.” This is certainly not an act of turning away from one’s embodiment or one’s situation in the world; rather, it is one of facing the fact that to get to one’s destination, one cannot always rely on an external force—whether the wind or free-floating rationality—to get where one aims; instead, one must recognize one’s own determination and work to be integral to achieving a new position—whether physical or intellectual—beyond one’s present situation. Further, we are challenged to acknowledge that former approaches and even areas of expertise can secure neither our relationship to the truth nor to our future; indeed, we may very well need to let go of past competencies and situations of comfort in order to venture insightfully into something new. In going to sea, I most certainly left behind my competencies and comforts, and in doing so, I arrived somewhere quite different than where I began. While further details of that 7 �transformation belong to another writing, I will speak briefly now to changes I experienced in my sense of what it means to say goodbye. Most straightforwardly, I began my trip thinking, quite reasonably, that a goodbye is most fundamentally the marker of some sort of ending. Yet, without claiming to be speaking to the entirety of Rilke’s challenge to us to learn to write the sailor’s goodbye, I’d now propose that the sailor’s goodbye is a goodbye that is pointedly not a closure or a move away from life, but rather the undertaking of learning how to make an authentic opening to life. The sailor’s goodbye, like a second sailing, is one, I would argue, that brings us home to the key existential recognitions that 1) without our effort, nothing will be accomplished: there simply will be no sailing without our sense of personal responsibility and our participation; 2) as much as a new venture makes a break with former ways of being, to be a successful sailor, you must not forget the land from which you came even when you leave its sight; you must remember that when you’re sailing away, you are only able to do so because you are also always sailing from some specific here; 3) it is only by saying goodbye to our former positions of comfort and certainty that we can say our next hellos; and, I would argue that this reflective leave-taking and vista-opening is the very activity of our never-ending, alwaysdemanding adventure of pursuing an examined life; 4) we forever require the push and pull of others as well as of new and unsettling experiences to continue to prompt us to the practice of reflective and engaged living; I also only learn how to engage life with both commitment and openness through companionship with others who are also engaged in the practice of caring for our shared world and for another; and, finally, 5) pursuing the examined life is necessarily a journey of uncertainty; just as the sailor faces in her voyage, the person living the examined life must go out into the unknown, with the only certainty being that she will arrive at her next destination a different person than when she departed. If she makes landfall, she will do so with 8 �such pressing questions as: Will those ashore be ready to greet me anew? Will they have waited for me, and, if so, will they, too, have traveled in such a way that they can resume being active companions for me in this life’s journey? Who have I become? Who should or must I become to arrive where next I ought to go? Is death my final destination, and if so, how ought I prepare for it? These questions return me once again and in conclusion to the significance of the liberal arts: for whether in conversation around a seminar table or working with others aloft in the rigging of the Picton Castle, I have found throughout my life that it is the liberal arts that provide us with both the grounding and the unsettling experiences that bring us humanely together in the activity of pursuing an examined life, and that prompt us to think, talk, and ultimately write about this undertaking. If I identify the sailor’s goodbye as one that acknowledges that we can never say enough to secure our relationships and their meaning once and for all, and one that also recognizes that we are not thereby excused from attempting to do so, the liberal arts can be seen as the practice and living testaments of our attempts of enacting this unending meaning making. Whether aboard a ship or collected in a classroom, may we heed the call, addressed to both our bodies and our minds, to keep alive and well this practice of “writing our existence”, and in so doing, never cease trying to figure out how to say a living goodbye. Said again, may we sail onwards, under second sail, towards our always-still-to-come homecoming. 9 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adventures in second sailing, or, Hands-on learning as central to a liberal arts education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Kirsten Jacobson at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jacobson, Kirsten Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004536 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/754cd9eea4bd4431de57de442bebcfaf.pdf 2bbdd522e6b3de3eecd646fdd3a99354 PDF Text Text 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. �3 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. �4 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 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bruegel's Via crucis : (visual) experience and the problem of interpretation Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Geoff Lehman at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lehman, Geoff Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Bruegel, Pieter, approximately 1525-1569. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004539 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ad96e7830d8d8b84cf3bd18a8359e70d.pdf 2b920a0e34d5147147da71ffabf0262d PDF Text Text 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. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cultural institutions, theatre, and humanistic liberal arts education : where do we go from here? Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by J. Scott Lee at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lee, J. Scott, 1948- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004538 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7783016c724315e931f4607002bf4825.pdf 45080cfba30b21b6ed39e7f5d3123987 PDF Text Text Do the Liberal Arts Today Serve any Useful Public Function? John Agresto I picked this somewhat provocative title because I think that the liberal arts and liberal education, if they are to survive, have to take more seriously than they do this question of their usefulness, especially their public usefulness. The liberal arts are dying in America, and they are dying in large measure because the public is unconvinced that any attention to these subjects, especially the humanities, are worth the cost, the effort, or the time. If you have any doubt regarding the decline of liberal arts education, just look at what students study in college these days. We all know a time when it was assumed that when students went off to college that a goodly number of them would study the liberal arts. We knew that many of them would major in English – which seemed always a preferred concentration – while others would study History or Mathematics or one of the hard sciences. There was, as well, always a serious handful who gravitated towards Foreign Languages or Philosophy or the Classics. So, where do things stand today in higher education? Well, today four of the top majors – Business Studies, Education, the Health Professions, and Engineering – account for 41% of all Bachelors degrees, while English and Literature accounts for a mere 3% of all such degrees. Today, just over 1% of our students major in any of the Physical Sciences, and Philosophy accounts for less than one half of one percent of the whole total. In fact, there are more Bachelor degrees given in 1 �something called “Parks, Recreation, Fitness and Leisure Studies” than are awarded in all the fields of History put together. Why is this the case? Let me give the most general answer first and then make it more specific in a bit. The liberal arts are dying because most Americans don’t see the point of them. They don’t get why a person should study literature or history or the classics -- or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of post-colonial states -- when their son can study engineering or their daughter get a business degree. It’s not only that they and their children want to get a good job and make lots of money – they often also want to make a contribution more generally to the world, do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, even their country, and they don’t see what “use” the liberal arts (in either their more traditional or especially in their newer formulations) are either to themselves or to society. Now we all know that talking about “usefulness” gives most liberal artists the willies. We in the liberal arts are always more comfortable with divorcing ourselves from utility, with seeing our enterprise as something higher than training people in the more useful arts or helping people gain a living. Now, my point is not to try to convince you of the worthiness of other forms of education, though I know I tend to see them as more worthy than many of my colleagues do. And my point is definitely not to tell you that today liberal education needs to adopt a rhetoric of usefulness deceive the public into thinking we’re something we are not. My point 2 �is simply that the liberal arts are, when at their best, not only of immense value – let’s even say of “use” -- not only for each of us as individuals but I think also and especially of use to society at large. Let me go back to the first years of this country. I’m reminded of the famous phrase of John Witherspoon, an early president of what would later become Princeton University, who said to his students that they should not “live useless and die contemptible.” To Witherspoon, to go to college and not draw from it some things – many things – of use to one’s self and to the world at large would have surely seemed quite strange. And, recognizing that among those who went to Princeton and listened to President Witherspoon were 9 future cabinet members, 12 governors, 21 senators, 39 congressmen, 3 Supreme Court justices, a vice president, and a president, James Madison, who was also one of 5 of Witherspoon’s students at the Constitutional Convention, I can only assume that the good Mr. Witherspoon thought it was particularly contemptible to be useless in the public realm, not just ineffectual in our private lives. Now, part of the reason why I’m troubled by the way liberal education seems always ready to denigrate other forms of education or to criticize society at large for our problems is that, in trying to shunt the blame elsewhere, we absolve ourselves too easily for our own decline. We have worn what we saw as our purity and inutility as a badge. When students turned away from us, we too often said it was their fault – that they were more interested in jobs and money-making than in education. We blamed pushy parents, or the materialism of modern life, or the rise 3 �(as this conference’s brochure mentions) of “consumerism.” Yes, we should be furious over the coming death of the liberal arts in America – but we should examine ourselves (and by “ourselves” I do not mean St. John’s in particular but the enterprise of liberal education at large) and be honest with ourselves. And, having come to grips with all the causes of our recent decline, we might begin to see that the death of the liberal arts is less a murder than a suicide. We all know how the liberal arts have marginalized themselves out of existence: Read the course catalogues of so many college and see how, for instance, departments of literature have become shells of their former selves. With the rise of graduate school analyses and specialization that is now so much a part of the undergraduate curriculum, how much vitality has been lost from literature. Gone today in too many places are all the stories that showed us the world with its joys and sorrows, gone all our marveling over the varieties of human types or stories of honor and treachery, of hopes ascendant and hopes dashed. All replaced by more ideologically-driven studies; all replaced with our contemporary infatuation with race and class and politics. Too many History departments stopped trying to show us all we could learn from the past and began to think it best to show us all we couldn’t learn from the past. After all, to take just one example, if the Founders of this country of ours were little more than white racist slaveholders who set up a government to in order to line their pockets and protect their interests, who in his right mind would want to waste his time and his parents money to study the Founding period seriously? 4 �Looking over the liberal arts, I’m not sure which of the many ‘isms’ of today has done the most damage. Is it the relativism and postmodernism that we fought over so furiously in the ‘80’s? Or is it the ideology of multiculturalism, which promised to expand greatly our worldview, but instead narrowed it mortally by making us ashamed to take so seriously the works of dead white European males? Is it the remnants of a kind of pop-Marxism, which always has us look for economic and material causes as the source of human motivation and thus diminishes what used to be seen as the sovereign power of arguments, thoughts, and ideas? Is it the rise of an ideology of “critical thinking” that passes itself off as the core of the liberal activity, but, sadly, spends more of its time in being critical than being thoughtful? Or is it, as I just mentioned before, the rise of the specialization of the graduate schools, which specialization has been the engine of progress in many of the advanced sciences and technology, but the cause of so much smallness of both mind and vision in the humanities? Let me stay on specialization for a second. How clearly I remember teaching at other reputable liberal arts colleges where the best undergraduates would tell me they wanted to double major… triple major if they could. Why? Because even they knew that what they were getting was too narrow, too small, too particularized and specialized to satisfy them. Maybe if they double majored they could see more. (Sadly, as too many of them found out, only rarely did double majoring expand anything. Often it meant closing oneself off from all else that should be learned.) 5 �Nevertheless, you see, students are generally not the problem. The best of them do want, in what I heard that Eudora Welty once said, “to see the world and see it whole.” Not see it “all.” Even they know no one can ever see it all. But so many do want to see it “whole.” See its interconnections, see the relationship between causes and effects; thought and act, act and consequences; between love and jealousy, jealousy and revenge, revenge and justice, justice and all other human goods. They have the vague sense that the universe is actually a cosmos – not a jumble of isolated and discrete, unrelated items but a web of relationships, where one insight leads to another, where one answer leads to another answer. Again, it’s not the students who are the problem. They have the same questions they have always had. Some have questions that revolve around culture and art; others have questions about why the natural world or the animal kingdom are they way they are. Almost all have moral questions -- – What is just? What makes something worthy? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? Now, that said, I do not believe that students are necessarily interested in having questions piled on top of questions in some endless stream of doubt. (“You think you have questions?! Wait till you see how many questions I have for you!” the tutor intimates. “And wait till this Socrates guy confronts you…then they’ll be a million questions!”) If all you have are questions, intriguing as they may be, not many students will be interested. Even Socrates, with all his questioning, still wanted to know the answers. 6 �Still, I admit, the opposite is worse. To say that the liberal arts and we ever so humane humanists have not only all the questions but all the answers -- answers that we will preach to you on every topic from the evils of capitalism to the foolishness of religious beliefs to the meaning of social justice -- well, having all the answers into which we “instruct” our students may well be the most corrupting and prevalent of contemporary academic evils. On many campuses how often is it the non-liberal studies that open up students’ minds while the humanities and their practitioners seem more intent on preaching and converting than in opening and liberating. And what parents in their right minds want to spend 50k a year for that? So, where does liberal education go from here? I’m especially interested in the issue I raised at the start, the question I so inelegantly framed in terms of use. Where do we go to show once again that the liberal arts can be of use for us as individuals and of benefit again to society as a whole? First, as I’ve already said too often, let’s stop denigrating the non-liberal arts and stop questioning the motives of those who look to pursue them. We do not build ourselves up by tearing down other worthy modes of education. Was Jefferson any less intelligent, less human or less “humane,” for having been an architect and farmer as well as a philosopher and political scientist? Second, let’s do what we can to help our students see what the important questions are and what the variety of important answers might be. Not what our answer is; not what the answer of the 7 �supposedly most just or sensitive or socially aware people are, but what the range and scope of all serious answers might be. Third, let’s put aside all the overblown platitudes and flowery banalities about ourselves – how we educate “the Whole Man” or how we feed the spirit and elevate the soul, or how we are the ones who really teach people how to think, or how we are the source and font of ever so much humane and ethical instruction. OK, if overblown hoo-ha isn’t what we should be chasing, what should we be doing? What actually IS the peculiar excellence of the liberal arts that we should present to prospective students and their parents? Let me cite a modest statement by John Henry Newman: The liberal arts are that “great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end.” What ordinary but great things might he be talking about? How about learning how to read. Read? What an ordinary thing you say. Yes, but when you read carefully and sympathetically (again, not exactly “critically” but sympathetically) you open the door to an amazing thing – You open the door to another person’s mind. You have the ability to do a truly great thing – you now have the ability to possess another’s thoughts. It’s truly marvellous: We humans may want someone else’s beauty or strength; we may want something physical and bodily. But we can’t. We can never really possess someone else’s material body even with the best of medical science at our disposal. But we can have the part of him or her that’s not material. We can possess someone else’s mind. Jefferson’s body may be mouldering in the grave; but his 8 �mind can still live in ours. His mind, his ideas and reasons, can live forever in us because he wrote and we have learned how to read. What else? Well, as I said before, among the best thing about adolescents is that most of them are looking for answers to their deepest questions – questions about love and justice, happiness and desire, nature and its workings. Again, great but ordinary matters. But this means, I believe, that so long as we can reinvigorate real literature, real philosophy, real historical and biographical studies that truly try to understand rather than debunk the past, real inquiry into the fine arts with serious inquiries into the beautiful and the sublime, and solid mathematics and science, all might yet be well. But this means reviving an older view of liberal education. I was reminded recently – not by Cardinal Newman but by Josef Pieper – of a sentence in Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “The Philosopher and the Poet have this in common – they both begin by marvelling.” The liberal arts do not begin in doubt, not even exactly in questioning, but simply in wonder, in marvelling. We begin as Miranda, the marvelling one, did – not with being critics of the world but with simply being overwhelmed with the wonder of the world. From there, all our questions flow -- Why are things as they are; why is the universe as it is? What are people really like? What am I to do? Again, all great but, in a real way, ordinary matters. To begin here, with wonder, is perhaps a start in answering the first part of what we seek – What is the use of a liberal education for me, for the individual. In this account, the first benefit is that it begins to satisfy 9 �the human craving to know, to have insight into serious answers to our most serious questions, perhaps even “to see the world and see it whole,” when that longing in us is most alive. Does this education have any other more outwardly useful or practical import for us as individuals? Yes, it does. Again to refer to Newman, such an education gives us a clearer and more conscious view of our own opinions and refines them. It helps us “to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what’s sophistical, and discard what’s irrelevant.” It shows us “how to influence others, how to come to an understanding with them, and how to bear with them.” In overcoming our ignorance of the past through history and our ignorance of human nature through philosophy and literature, we are less likely to be ruled by slogans or unexamined opinions, less likely to be moved by emotion simply or demagogues, less easily duped because we lack a conception of the evil possibilities of our natures. I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln, who, while he hardly went to school at all, was by any and every measure “educated,” liberally educated. He read, as we know, biographies and histories, he read the Bible and Shakespeare, and he read literature, especially poetry. He did this for a kind of highest use. He did all this, as one of his biographers said, not just to know how better to write or speak but “to learn what the patterns of a man’s life might be like.” Still, if all his education did was make Lincoln into a private man useful to himself in his everyday life, none of would notice, none of us really care. What we remember was that Lincoln – and before him all 10 �the great men of the American Founding – knew that what was good for them as private intellects might also be of great value, of great use, to creating and then re-creating a whole nation, perhaps a whole world. Jefferson learned from the study of modern moral and political philosophy the self-evident truths that lay behind the writing of his (and our) Declaration of Independence. Or consider James Madison: Without the study of the history of all prior democracies or his inquiries into all confederacies, both classical and modern, coupled with his deep reflection on what we were once bold to call “human nature,” Madison could not have become the Father of the Constitution. Without their philosophical, political, and historical studies of the preconditions of popular governments and the nature of tyrannical rule, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay could not have written the Federalist Papers, nor could the populace have read them. It was hardly modern political science that was behind the making of America – it was the liberal arts. Remember what John Witherspoon told so many of that early generation – do not live useless and die contemptible. I think I’m right to say they followed this admonition. But let me go beyond talking about the liberal arts and high statesmanship and spend a minute just on the liberal arts and the rest of us. What else might the liberal arts do that’s of use, of value, for all society? Again, from Newman: Our studies aim “at raising the intellectual tone of society, cultivating the public mind, supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aim to popular aspirations, giving 11 �enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, and refining the intercourse of private life.” While we might spend five more talks on each of these seemingly ordinary but truly great aims, let me spend a minute on just one that has always struck me – the cultivation of the public and the public mind. Indeed, while I know it’s unfashionable these days to say this, I also know that the liberal arts once gave a lovely gift to society: It transmitted the great heights of culture, this culture, to everyone. While other parts of a university education might be progressive and forwardlooking, the liberal arts had no hesitation in looking backwards. It understood it had a conserving function to play. It preserved for everyone, not just the elites, beautiful music, fine art, high culture, fabulous literature, good poetry. In this regard it wasn’t ashamed to be Western, or even Eurocentric. Indeed, it had a kind of honest pride in being the caretakers of such wonderful treasures, our treasures. Liberal education once knew that its keeping the culture alive was actually one of the most publicly useful thing it could do. It gave beauty and intelligence, tone and cultivation, as Newman says, to the whole society. In this way the liberal arts were for more than the simply the enjoyment of a few lucky students or the domain of the rich and wellborn – they were the gift the liberal arts gave to everyone. Back then, the liberal arts didn’t feel bad that Dante and Homer were dead white males. Nor did we, the children of working men and the grand children of immigrant women, feel bad about it either. In fact, back then 12 �humanists actually thought, and rightly so, that keeping Shakespeare alive was a universal gift, not an ethnocentric act. Having been given such treasures, it is now our turn to repay Shakespeare and Milton, Aristotle and Madison. So, we repay them as best we can – by keeping them alive. Their bodies, as I said before, may be dead, but they aren’t. And keeping the words and thoughts and works of great men and women alive is not only of the highest use for us both individually and as a society, but an act of repayment, of justice, to each of them. 13 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 13 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Do the liberal arts today serve any useful public function? Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by John Agresto at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004517 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f5dd24448212878cb4c7eaffc4f96e5b.pdf 72de20d7f198ec7b9f7f532433dceefb PDF Text Text Education of the Regime and the Soul in The Federalist∗ Charles C. Claunch∗∗ Abstract: As a general proposition, any regime requires at least some of its citizens to think and behave in ways that, at a minimum, do not undermine the regime. That requirement points to the need for education for at least some of the regime’s citizens. In presenting arguments for ratification of the U.S. Constitution, however, the authors of The Federalist make no explicit argument for such education. Despite this omission, The Federalist provides the basis for an education in citizenship in two respects. First, The Federalist, as a work of public, reasoned advocacy, teaches it readers not only the need for the Constitution and the meanings (or possible meanings) of it provisions, but how to think about it and how to act in the constitutional regime to be created under it. The authors intended The Federalist to be a continuing basis for thought, conversation, and action after ratification. Second, by dealing explicitly with what we now call the doctrine of judicial review, the authors of The Federalist made explicit the idea of a small group of specially-selected people voiding acts of the legislative and executive branches of the government. This role of the federal judiciary may be recognized as that of teacher. The federal courts’ interpretations of the Constitution and the law are the judges’ teachings, and the officers of the political branches and the regime’s citizens are the judges’ students. The Federalist and the work of judges serve as an education for governing ourselves as individual souls and as a Constitutional regime. This essay has its origins in a master’s essay I wrote for St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 2005.1 It’s a pleasure to revisit this place with a continuation of work that I started here almost ten years ago. The title of that thesis was “State and Soul in The Federalist.” The title of my essay today reflects better terminology – “regime” instead of “state” – and a concentration on and expansion of the final section of that essay. Very briefly: in “State and Soul in The Federalist,” I explored what is required of a citizen in the conception of the U.S. Constitution held by the authors of The Federalist. ∗ Presented at “What Is Liberal Education For? A Conference at St. John’s College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe Campus” on 16 October 2014. ∗∗ Charles C. Claunch is a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Philosophic Studies of the Braniff School of Liberal Arts and in the Department of Politics, University of Dallas, Irving, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of government at Tarrant County College, Fort Worth, Texas, and at Richland College, Dallas, Texas. He is also a Texas attorney and a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law (J.D., 1998). He completed both graduate degrees offered by St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico (M.A.L.A., 2004; M.A.E.C., 2005). 1 Charles C. Claunch, “State and Soul in The Federalist,” (M.A. Liberal Arts thesis, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, 2005). �2 Following up on the authors’ suggestion that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature,” I used the Constitutional regime described in The Federalist to understand both that regime and the individual “Constitutional soul.”2 In that original essay, I made the following broad points: 1. Power can be exercised legitimately by all three branches of the Constitutional regime, but the judiciary can void acts of the legislature and the executive; we call this today “judicial review.” This suggests, correspondingly, that the individual can use judgment, will, and force (to use the terms of The Federalist)3 but that judgment can exercise a certain kind of control over will and force.4 2. The necessary and proper clause5 suggests personal liberty with a necessarily broad reach and the supremacy clause6 suggests the acceptability of one’s acts, according to one’s judgment, as long as they are compatible with one’s responsibilities.7 3. The discussion of the control of faction in No. 10 of The Federalist suggests control of individual passions through (a) the development by the individual of a variety of interests, none of which motivate his actions completely but all of which engage his attention to some moderate degree, and (b) the reduction of time and energy devoted to any single interest, reducing the chances of waste or of indulging in passions with regard to any single interest.8 2 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York: Modern Library, 2000) (“The Federalist”), No. 51, 331. 3 Ibid., No. 78, 496. 4 Claunch, 2-6. 5 U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sec. 8, cl. 18. 6 Ibid., art. 6, cl. 2. 7 Claunch, 6-10. 8 The Federalist, No. 10, 53-61; Claunch, 11-15. �3 4. Appropriate judicial review and political acts mutually affect each other. Appropriate judicial review provides a reasoned sense of the limits of Constitutional power in various circumstances, and Constitutionally-minded deliberations, policy statements, and legal defenses justifying the political branches’ acts provide grist for the mill of a well-informed and wellreasoned judicial review. This suggests that similarly, individual judgment and one’s acts of will and force mutually affect each other. Individual judgment is used to determine the extent and responsibilities of one’s individual liberty, and in doing so it governs one’s acts of will and force; one’s acts of will and force and the reasons for them provide material on which individual judgment can operate.9 5. The actions of the Constitutional convention, the ratification of the Constitution, and the various methods of Constitutional amendment suggest the wisdom of adoption of new or revised individual standards in the presence of outmoded or inadequate standards. They should be changed greatly, however, only when necessary; generally, they should be changed only incrementally. The defense by the authors of The Federalist of Constitutional drafting, ratification, and amendment is an expression of their confidence in the capacity of the people, together and as individuals, to use judgment, will, and force to assess and change standards in a harmony that makes good use of liberty.10 6. The authors of The Federalist present the Constitution as an invitation to and a means for the people, individually and collectively, to rise above their usual selves at the same time as it tries to protect them from their failure to do so. This rise, however, requires an understanding of 9 Claunch, 15-21. 10 Ibid., 21-27. �4 the Constitution and of the individual. Both the existence and the lessons of The Federalist indicate that the authors believe that such understanding can be taught and learned.11 All of these broad points were developed to lead to the idea that The Federalist and judges play important roles in the education of the Constitutional regime and the citizen of that regime. I turn now to the final section of the thesis and my expansion of it for our conference today.12 The Constitution makes no explicit provision for, and The Federalist makes no explicit argument for, education. Despite the omission of an explicit discussion, however, The Federalist provides the basis for an education in citizenship in two respects. First, the authors of The Federalist, as a work of public, reasoned advocacy, teach their readers the need for the Constitution and the meanings or possible meanings of its provisions and how to think about it and how to act in the Constitutional regime to be created under it. With their detailed arguments, the authors ask their readers to think deeply and to assess or make cogent counterarguments concerning their government. In particular, the arguments of the authors regarding the meanings of the more contentious provisions make it clear that after ratification those provisions’ meanings and implications will have to be worked out in practice through day-to-day operation of the government. The thrust of The Federalist is that the Constitution allows its meanings and implications to unfold in time, within limits. Beyond assisting ratification, by making their arguments, they intended to shape future debates by providing a continuing basis for thought, conversation, and action after ratification. 11 Ibid., 27. 12 Ibid., 28-32. �5 Second, by dealing explicitly with what we now call the doctrine of judicial review, the authors of The Federalist made explicit the idea of a small group of specially-selected people voiding acts of the legislative and executive branches of the government, at times against the immediate will of the people but in conformance with the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution. Despite their argument that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the branches, the actual power of judicial review is clear enough from the authors’ discussion as a whole.13 If the judiciary’s interpretation of the law is to be called rule by an unelected elite, it is very indirect rule, practiced through decisions in cases raised by legislative and executive acts and subject to limitation and change through amendments to the Constitution. If it is to be called politics, it is an attenuated politics, filtered through the formal requirements of explaining decisions in terms of law, and again subject to limitation and change through Constitutional amendment. As an alternative to these negative characterizations, the role of the federal judiciary may be recognized positively as that of teacher. The federal courts’ interpretations of the Constitution and the law are the judges’ teachings, and the officers of the political branches and the regime’s citizens are their students. The judges and their interpretations are one source of understanding of how we, as a Constitutional regime and as individuals in it, may govern ourselves. Judges are fallible, like all other humans, and therefore their judging and their teachings are liable to fallibility. Their isolation from the political branches and from the politics of the people cannot isolate them from their own humanity. Judges must have and are expected to exercise the same qualities for which the authors of The Federalist hoped in the people’s choices as political agents—but the necessity of isolation means that they are expected to have the same 13 The Federalist, No. 78, 496. �6 weaknesses as the rest of us, too. The issue is whether judges can be expected, in their isolation from politics, to turn away from personal passions and illegitimate interests to a reasonable degree, or whether they should be expected to indulge them without adequate restraint. The mechanism described by the authors to prevent a concentration of power in one department in which “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place,” has only limited applicability to the judiciary.14 The quality of ambition required by this competition among the branches seems incompatible with the particular quality of public-spiritedness required of judges. By participating in such institutional ambition contests, judges would risk setting themselves up as a third political branch that is concerned primarily with policy like the other two branches. In keeping with the unique nature of the role and power of the judiciary with respect to the other two governmental branches, the measures appropriate to assist judges in performing their role are different than the measures designed for politicians. To work successfully as judges and teachers, judges must exercise a self-control that is analogous to the governmental self-control that they exert on other parts of the government. Most crucially among government agents, judges must confine themselves to acts of will and force that lie within the boundaries imposed by their Constitutional positions. Their isolation improves their opportunity to internalize those constraints, but it does not give them the required means. Judges must have the will and the force to do what judgment tells them that they must do and to refrain from doing what it tells them that they must not do. They must direct and teach without dictating. If they are successful at self-control, they teach the remainder of the government and the people Constitutional self-control by exposition and example through their public, reasoned opinions and through the self-control that gives rise to those opinions. Thus, 14 Ibid., No. 51, 331. �7 well-behaved judges are also a source of our understanding of how we may govern ourselves as individuals. To illustrate well-behaved federal judges displaying such judicial self-control, I present two examples of relevant judicial teaching among many attractive candidates. The first example is Justice James Wilson’s seriatim opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia.15 The second example is the introductory part of the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., in National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius.16 Chisholm presented this question: was the State of Georgia subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit brought by two South Carolina citizens against Georgia to collect a debt? The relevant Constitutional provision stated that “[t]he Judicial Power [vested in the U.S. Supreme Court] shall extend … to Controversies … between a State and Citizens of another State ….”17 Taken literally, the Constitution granted the Court jurisdiction over states in suits like the Chisholm suit. But in answering objections to this provision in The Federalist, Publius argued that [i]t is inherent in the nature of sovereignty, not to be amenable to the suit of an individual without its consent …. [T]he exemption, as one of the several attributes of sovereignty, is now enjoyed by the government of every state in the union. Unless, therefore, there is a surrender of this immunity in the plan of the convention [the proposed Constitution], it will remain with the states, and the danger intimated must remain merely ideal…. [T]o ascribe to the federal courts, by mere implication, and in destruction of a pre-existing right of the state governments, a power which would involve such a consequence, would be altogether forced and unwarrantable.18 15 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793). 16 567 U.S. ________ (2012) (opinion of Roberts, C.J.) (slip opinion). Parts of this opinion – though not the introduction discussed here – were the opinion of the Court. 17 U.S. Constitution, art. 3, sec. 2, cl. 1. 18 The Federalist, No. 81, 521-22. �8 In seriatim opinions, four out of five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justice Wilson, made the “forced and unwarrantable” inference dismissed by Publius, deciding that the Court had jurisdiction over Georgia, with one justice dissenting.19 Rather than starting with the relevant clause of the U.S. Constitution and its implications, Wilson started with the much broader question, “Do the people of the United States form a nation?” Wilson’s opinion in Chisholm is a rich display of learning in philosophy and law, and it can be appreciated as a lesson to the public about how to think about what ratifying the Constitution meant. Amusingly, Wilson used the wording of a toast to make a profound Constitutional point. He noted that the toast is given in the form, “[t]he United States,” instead of “[t]he People of the United States,” and that this reflects a confusion between the artificial person, the United States, and the natural person, the people of the United States, who “spoke it [the United States] into existence.”20 In adopting the Constitution, the people – including the people of Georgia speaking as part of the people of the United States – were capable of vesting and did in fact vest judicial power over states, including Georgia, in federal courts.21 Among the lines of argument that Wilson followed, I focus here on his treatment of the scope of Georgia’s sovereignty as a state of the United States. He argued that the citizens of Georgia, when “they acted upon the large scale of the Union,” acted “as a part of the ‘People of the United States’” and did not surrender their sovereign power to Georgia; rather, with respect 19 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 429-50 (seriatim opinion of Iredell, J., dissenting), 450-53 (seriatim opinion of Blair, J.), 453-66 (seriatim opinion of Wilson, J.), 466-69 (seriatim opinion of Cushing, J.), 469-79 (seriatim opinion of Jay, C.J.). 20 Wilson, James, Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793) (seriatim opinion), in Vol. 1, The Collected Works of James Wilson, eds. Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 362. 21 Ibid., 362. �9 to the purposes of the Union, they retained their sovereign power to themselves.22 Consequently, the State of Georgia was not a sovereign state with regard to the Union.23 Later in his opinion, Wilson argued that the Court’s decision of the case at hand was one of purposes of the United States, so that Georgia was not sovereign for the purpose of the suit. He further argued at length that the people of the United States intended to form a national government for national purposes, complete with legislative, executive, and judicial power.24 Contrary to Publius, Wilson argues that to have allowed in this complete national scheme an exception for states to consent to be sued would “be repugnant to our very existence as a nation[.]”25 This is an instance in which Wilson’s teaching with regard to nationhood differed from that of Publius. As noted above, Publius saw nothing repugnant to the Constitutional regime for states to retain sovereign immunity. Only after following several other lines of argument to reach the conclusion that Georgia was subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in the suit (and I leave the others aside in the present essay) does Wilson turn to the meaning of the specific relevant text of the Constitution. “[C]ould this strict and appropriated language, describe, with more precise accuracy, the cause now depending before the tribunal?”26 The question is rhetorical, and the answer, to Wilson, obviously negative. Note that with respect the Constitutional text, Wilson and Publius taught two different but reasonable ways of reading the grant of power. Wilson read the grant strictly, requiring no additional language to deprive the states of the relevant aspect of sovereign 22 Ibid., 355 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 362-66. 25 Ibid., 365. 26 Ibid., 365-66. �10 immunity, while Publius read the grant in the context of the states’ historical powers, understanding it to be limited tacitly by the states’ sovereign immunity absent specific language denying that immunity to the states. Like the authors of The Federalist, Wilson explained the reasons for his opinion publicly and clearly, teaching the people a particular method of thinking about themselves and the Constitution that they had adopted. It was left to the people and their elected representatives to decide whether Wilson’s lessons, the lessons of The Federalist, or some other lessons would be accepted. In this particular case, the people – through their elected representatives in the Congress and in the requisite number of states – rejected his teaching and that of the Supreme Court majority. In 1794 the Congress proposed and in 1794 and 1795 the requisite number of state legislatures ratified the Eleventh Amendment to exempt a state from suits by citizens of another state or by citizens or subjects of a foreign state. This rapid response to the Court’s decision in Chisholm is itself an illustration of the capacity of the people, acting through their elected representatives, to react to federal judicial decisions. Chief Justice Roberts’s more recent opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius was a much more direct example of judicial teaching.27 In the first six pages, Roberts was obviously teaching his readers certain aspects of the judiciary’s relationship to the political branches, the people, and the Constitution. He began his lesson by pointing out that “[i]n our federal system, the National Government possesses only limited powers; the States and the people retain the remainder,” and by quoting Chief Justice Marshall’s observation that the extent of the powers granted to the federal government “will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.”28 “Resolving this controversy [the issue at hand] requires us to 27 National Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. ________ (2012) (slip opinion) (“NFIB”); NFIB, opinion of Roberts, C.J. 28 NFIB, opinion of Roberts, C.J., 2. �11 examine both the limits of the Government’s power, and our own limited role in policing those boundaries.”29 Our concern here is primarily with Roberts’s examination of the Court’s role in enforcing the limits of the federal government’s powers. Roberts argued that the Supreme Court reads Constitutional grants of power to the federal government “permissively” because it is reluctant to void acts of elected federal officials. In Roberts’s view of the Court’s role, the Court should void such an act only when the absence of Constitutional authority to pass the act (or, by extension, the absence of Constitutional authority to perform an executive act) is clearly demonstrated.30 “[Policy] decisions are entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”31 On the other hand, according to Roberts, “[o]ur deference in matters of policy cannot, however, become abdication on matters of law…. [T]here can be no question that it is the responsibility of this Court to enforce the limits on federal power by striking down acts of Congress that transgress those limits.”32 By logical extension, Roberts’s argument extends to voiding executive acts that transcend Constitutional limits, too. Aside from his obvious teaching of the role of the people and of elected officials in the Constitutional regime, Roberts’s argument implies that the Supreme Court and the federal courts generally have an educational role. When an issue is presented for decision by a court, that court must decide which Constitutional grants and limits on federal power are relevant to the issue, and it must explain the reasons for that decision to the public. The court must then decide whether the 29 Ibid., 2. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. �12 legislative or executive act at issue is a transgression of Constitutional limits, again publicly explaining the reasons for the decision. The fact that Roberts explains the role of the Court strongly implies that he understands that for the Court to be seen to be staying out of policy decisions and to be seen as making legitimate Constitutional decisions, it must explain its decisions publicly and credibly. Going beyond such limited efforts to retain credibility, Roberts’s teaching points to the Court’s role in educating the public and government officials about the Court’s responsibilities with regard to policy judgments and Constitutional judgments. Careful delineation of the policy and Constitutional questions and careful observance by judges of their responsibilities with respect to those questions serve to teach the public Constitutional and personal self-control. It is entirely possible, of course, that the Court can make a policy judgment by mistaking it for or disguising it as a Constitutional judgment, and it has been accused of doing so (e.g., in NFIB v. Sebelius). The value of public explanations, as noted in the discussion of Wilson and Chisholm, is that they provide material that government officials and the public can use to make their own judgments in accepting or rejecting their judges’ teachings. As the authors of The Federalist point out, if judges fail in self-control, the last resort lies in the people themselves.33 Do people need to be made ready for such responsibility, and if so, how? According to the authors of The Federalist, men require government “because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”34 Free people require more than the constraining Constitutional regime described in The Federalist; they require self-control. The authors of The Federalist appeal to a capacity among their readers to 33 The Federalist, No. 51, 331-32. 34 Ibid., No. 15, 91. �13 consider their arguments. Individuals must learn, or they must be taught, even that preliminary skill, and, as the foregoing discussion suggests, much more is required of Constitutional citizens. They must have the capacity to choose their agents well and to observe and judge them carefully. To observe and judge the behavior of political officers and judges with respect to the Constitution, an individual must understand the dynamic of legislative and executive action and judicial review as they relate to his liberty so that he may act in his rationally-directed and rationally-constrained interests. The Constitutional regime requires self-constrained citizens who are capable of establishing and maintaining a government that can constrain them when necessary and a government that in turn can exercise and demonstrate power responsibly by exercising and demonstrating self-restraint. The Constitutional regime and the Constitutional citizen must mutually shape and sustain each other. The Federalist is a significant feature of that mutual shaping and sustaining, speaking to the people for a conception of the Constitution and providing a model for some of the continuing requirements of citizenship. The judiciary, as it plays its unique role in the Constitutional regime as intermediary between the people and their legislative and executive agents, speaking for the Constitution to the people and their agents and providing examples and explanations for the continuing requirements of government, is also a significant feature of that mutual shaping and sustaining.35 The Federalist and the work of judges serve as an education for governing ourselves as individual souls and as a Constitutional regime. 35 “It is far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and their legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” The Federalist, No. 78, 498. �14 Works Cited Claunch, Charles C. “State and Soul in The Federalist.” M.A. Liberal Arts thesis. St. John’s College, Santa Fe, 2005. Chisholm v. Georgia. 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793). Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. Edited by Robert Scigliano. New York: Modern Library, 2000. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. 567 U.S. _______ (2012). Slip opinion. Roberts, John R., Jr. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. 567 U.S. _______ (2012) (opinion). Slip opinion. Wilson, James. Chisholm v. Georgia. 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793) (seriatim opinion). In Vol. 1, Collected Works of James Wilson. Edited by Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 14 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education of the regime and the soul in The Federalist Description An account of the resource Paper presented October 16, 2014 by Charles Claunch at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Claunch, Charles C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Federalist. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004524 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6f4f4d6e9d4220eb763b33f24aaddf92.pdf 6c3ebd78ca9f132013dbc5b0911f60ae PDF Text Text Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Fame and the Solitary Life: Rethinking the Liberal Arts through the Paradoxes of Petrarchan Humanism Steve Baker Columbia University “When we are free from necessary business and other concerns we are eager to see or to hear or to learn.”1 – Cicero, De Officiis, I, 13 (trans. M. T. Griffin) Much has been made of Petrarch’s momentous discovery of Cicero’s collection of familiar letters to his friend Atticus, the so-called Ad Atticum.2 Uncovered in 1345 in Verona, it marked a decisive turning point in the development of Petrarch’s work.3 Yet, relatively little has been made of Petrarch’s analogous discovery in 1333 of Cicero’s Pro Archia.4 Its importance 1 “Cum sumus necessariis negotiis, curisque vacui, tum avemus aliquid videre, audire, discere.” 2 On Petrarch’s discovery of Ad Atticum in 1345, see Kirkham, “A Life’s Work” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, p. 21 ff.: “As a ‘born-again’ ancient, Petrarch made his greatest manuscript discovery in the Verona cathedral library, the sixteen books of Cicero’s Ad Atticum along with two minor collections, to the Roman orator’s brother Quintus and to Brutus. From these, which the classics detective excitedly transcribed over several weeks in the spring of 1345 (a period when he also came to know Dante’s son Pietro Alighieri), Petrarch took the tremendous idea of collecting his own letters.” See also Billanovich, “Dall’Epystolarum mearum ad diversos liber ai Rerum familiarium libri XXIV,” pp. 1-55. 3 On the influence of the Ad Atticum on Petrarch and Renaissance letters, see Witt, “Medieval Ars Dictaminis and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem”; Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, pp. 49 ff.; and Fantazzi, “General Introduction” in Vives, De conscribendis epistolis. 4 On Petrarch’s discovery of the Pro Archia, see Seniles XVI, 1. During a grand northern European tour he took under the aegis of his Colonna patronage in 1333, Petrarch made a detour to visit a monastery in Liege (Belgium) reputed to be rich in manuscripts. It was there that he found and quickly copied two hitherto unknown Ciceronian orations, the Pro Archia and the apocryphal Ad milites romanae, one of which he quickly copied and had a friend copy the other. Since Petrarch’s travel expenses were covered by the Colonna, Wilkins (Studies in the Life and Work of Petrarch, pp. 5-8) assumes that he probably also served in some kind of official way, either as messenger or cultural attaché or diplomat. Regarding Petrarch’s service as “capellanus continuus commensalis” to the Colonna family, see Dotti, Vita di Petrarca, pp. 28-47. 1 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu cannot be overstated.5 Stumbling upon the neglected manuscript in a monastery library in Liège, the twenty-nine-year-old recent law school drop-out struck on not only an impassioned validation of his decision to pursue a life in letters but also a platform from which to launch the cultural revolution that would become Renaissance humanism.6 In just the first few pages of the Roman orator’s defense of the poet Archias, Petrarch found what would become the blueprint for much of his long and illustrious career.7 With its themes of the “elevating influence of poetry” (III, 6), the role of friendship and patronage in the professional poet’s life (III, 6), the question of pan-Italian Roman citizenship under the Lex Iulia (IV, 6-7), and its praise of literary studies (VI, 12-14), the Pro Archia resonates in far-ranging ways through Petrarch’s humanistic project: from his literary works to his epistolary politics, from his neo-Latin epic, the Africa, to his support for Cola di Rienzo’s quixotic attempt to resurrect the Roman republic and unify Italy. 5 See Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 49-50; Pastore Stocchi, Introduzione in Petrarca, Opere latine, pp. 15-17; and Guglielminetti, Petrarca e il petrarchismo, pp. 33. 6 See Cicero, Pro Archia, II, 4: “Nam ut primum ex pueris excessit Archias atque ab eis artibus quibus aetas puerilis ad humanitatem informari solet, se ad scribendi studium contulit.” (”As soon as Archias had left behind him his boyhood, and those influences which mould and elevate his boyish mind, he applied himself to the pursuit of a literary career.”) All translations of the Pro Archia are from the Loeb edition translated by Watts. On the origins of humanism, see also Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism”; Weiss, The Dawn of Italian Humanism; Witt, “Medieval Italian Cutlure and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal,” pp. 29-70. 7 The symphonic opening sentence of the oration validates the value of literary pursuits in the legal profession (Cicero, Pro Archia, I, 1): “Si quid est in me ingeni, iudices, quod sentio quam sit exiguum, aut si qua exercitatio dicendi, in qua me non infitior mediocriter esse versatum, aut si huiusce rei ratio aliqua ab optimarum artium studiis ac disciplina profecta, a qua ego nullum confiteor aetatis meae tempus abhorruisse, earum rerum omnium vel in primis hic A. Licinius fructum a me repetere prope suo iure debet” (“Whatever talent I possess (and I realize its limitations), whatever be my oratorical experience (and I do not deny that my practice herein has been not inconsiderable), whatever knowledge of the theoretical side of my profession I may have derived from a devoted literary apprenticeship (and I admit that at no period of my life has the acquisition of such knowledge been repellent to me), – to any advantage that may be derived from all these my friend Aulus Licinius has a pre-eminent claim, which belongs to him almost of right”). 2 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu The Pro Archia is not so much a defense of an individual poet as it is a panegyric on the importance of the liberal arts and those who cultivate them.8 The value of humanistic studies, according to Cicero,9 lies in their usefulness in matters of state and the expansion of its sphere of influence: “literature exalts the nation whose high deeds it sings.”10 In praising poets for the benefit they bring to the life of the republic and its citizens by incentivizing them with the promise of immortality for their noteworthy deeds, Cicero’s Pro Archia presents the deep 8 Cicero, Pro Archia, I, 2: “Etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.” (”Indeed, the subtle bond of a mutual relationship links together all arts which have any bearing upon the common life of mankind.”) The way Cicero phrases the common bond that all arts have with each other is richer than Watts’ English translation here suggests. In the original: “quasi cognatione quadam,” in English literally means: “as though by a kind of kindred relationship,” or “by a sort of, as it were, blood relationship.” Cicero qualifies cognatione with both quasi and quadam because he is using the term, which technically describes a familial, blood relationship, metaphorically (see, also, quoddam commune above and quasi divino quodam spiritu, further down in the passage). These are the exaggerated signposts he is deploying in order to make it clear that he is asking his audience to indulge him as he uses in his defense a new style of speaking (“novum genus dicendi”), one suited more to the nature of his client, a poet, than to a court of law. On the usefulness of literary studies, see also, Cicero, Pro Archia, VI, 13: “[...] ex his studiis haec quoque crescit oratio et facultas, quae quantacumque in me est, numquam amicorum periculis defuit” (”[...] my devotion to letters strengthens my oratorical powers, and these, such as they are, have never failed my friends in their hour of peril”). 9 Cicero, Pro Archia, VI, 12: “Ego vero fateor me his studiis esse deditum: ceteros pudeat, si qui se ita litteris abdiderunt ut nihil possint ex eis neque ad communem adferre fructum, neque in aspectum lucemque proferre” (“I am a votary of literature, and make the confession unashamed; shame belongs rather to the bookish recluse, who knows not how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows, or to manifest its fruits to the eyes of all”). 10 See Cicero, Pro Archia, X, 23: “Propterea quod Graeca leguntur in omnibus fere gentibus, Latina suis finibus, exiguis sane, continentur. Qua re si res eae quas gessimus orbis terrae regionibus definiuntur, cupere debemus, quo manuum nostrarum tela pervenerint, eodem gloriam famamque penetrare: quod cum ipsis populis de quorum rebus scribitur, haec ampla sunt, tum eis certe, qui de vita gloriae causa dimicant, hoc maximum et periculorum incitamentum est et laborum” (“Greek literature is read in nearly every nation under heaven, while the vogue of Latin is confined to its own boundaries, and they are, we must grant, narrow. Seeing therefore, that the activities of our race know no barrier save the limits of the round earth, we ought to be ambitious that whithersoever our arms have penetrated there also our fame and glory should extend; literature exalts the nation whose high deeds it sings, and at the same time there can be no doubt that those who stake their lives to fight in honor's cause find therein a lofty incentive to peril and endeavor”). 3 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu affiliation between politics and literary or artistic production.11 Petrarch’s encounter with the poet Archias through Cicero will forever assure a place for poetry at the center of the vocation of the humanist. It played, for example, a decisive role at this early stage in his life seeing that it also inspired the address he delivered eight years later when he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter Sunday in 1341.12 Deemed the “first manifesto of the Renaissance” by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Petrarch’s Coronation Oration is a classically inspired treatise that valorizes the role of the poet in society.13 Like Cicero in the Pro Archia,14 and as Ennius did before him, Petrarch places poets in 11 See Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 49-50: “Ma un’esaltazione della poesia come quella che il Petrarca scoperse e divulgò, a partire dal 1333, con l’orazione ciceroniana Pro Archia, ammetteva appunto un’accezione più ampia, per la quale la persona stessa del poeta era esaltata e consacrata come augusta e influente. D’altro canto, le biografie di Orazio o di Virgilio, ma anche, per esempio, di Aristotele, rilette in questa luce, apparivano confermare una speciale attitudine del poeta e del filosofo a definirsi quale amicus principis per eccellenza, potenzialmente affiancabile ai potenti terreni in una sorta di diarchia: illusione carezzata ancora, fino alla morte di Lorenzo de Medici, dal Poliziano e da altri intellettuali della cerchia medicea. Ma se mai questa illusione egemonica, che a un certo numero di umanisti affermati non accordò mai se non qualche cancellierato e molte cadute in disgrazia, poté sembrare vicina a realizzarsi per davvero, questo avvenne con il Petrarca: primo e probabilmente unico letterato moderno cui sia stato così universalmente riconosciuto un primato anche sociale, non per la ‘gratia Dei’ che incoraggiava Dante a parlare, ma per il carisma della sua intelligenza e del suo sapere.” 12 See Fam. IV, 8 to Barbato da Sulmona: “Idibus Aprilis, anno etatis huius ultime millesimo trecentesimo quadragesimo primo, in Capitolio Romano, magna populi frequentia et ingenti gaudio, peractum est quod nudiustertius de me rex apud Neapolim decreverat: Ursus Anguillarie, comes ac senator, prealti vir ingenii, regio iudicio probatum laureis frondibus insignivit” (“On the Ides of April, and in the 1,341st year of this age, on the Roman Capitoline, in the presence of a large multitude and with great joy, there occurred what the King of Naples had decreed for me the day before yesterday; Orso dell’Anguillara, a friend and senator, a man of lofty talents, honored me with the laurel crown as approved by the King’s judgment”). A majority of book IV of the Familiares is dedicated to recounting the vicissitudes surrounding the coronation though he never describes many of the specific details of the event itself. 13 For the manifesto pronouncement, see Wilkins, “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” p. 300. For a reconstruction of the events surrounding the coronation, see Tatham, Francesco Petrarca: The First Modern Man of Letters (His Life and Correspondence: A Study of the Early Fourteenth Century 13041347), II, pp. 104-52; Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch.” See also Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 50: “Il riconoscimento, cioè, dell’umanista quale titolare di uno status eccezionale, che delle sue competenze trae vantaggio per collocarlo ai vertici del corpo sociale. Era, certo, un’utopia effimera, nutrita a sua volta di altre più antiche utopie accreditate dalla tradizione classica con argomenti più or meno speciosi.” 4 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu league with princes – not least of all because the same laurel wreath adorns both poets, when crowned with literary glory, and princes, in a triumphal military procession.15 The prince needs the poet in order to ensure that the glory of his deeds will endure long into the collective memory of posterity.16 The poet needs the prince for such favors and privileges patronage can provide, namely, the protection of the very otium or leisure necessary to produce such timeless works of commemorative art.17 14 The Pro Archia is first mentioned by name in Petrarch’s “The Coronation Oration,” p. 301: “Take not my word for this, but Cicero’s, who in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias has this to say of poets: ‘We have it upon the authority of the most learned men that whereas the poet attains through his very nature, is moved by the energy that is within his mind, and is as it were inspired by a divine inbreathing – so that Ennius fairly calls poets sacred in their own right, since they appear to be commended to us by the possession of a divine gift.’” And again toward the end at Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 308: “Certain illustrious men, foreseeing such a possibility, have kept poets with them and held them in high honor, so that there might be someone who would hand down their praises to posterity – a matter carefully set forth by Cicero in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias, to which I have already referred.” See Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 309, where the full Ciceronian passage with the anecdote itself is quoted verbatim. 15 On Petrarch’s linking of poets to princes by means of the honor of the laurel crown, see Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch,” pp. 155-97; for an analysis of his oration, see especially pp. 172-9. See also Petrarca, Rvf. 321 and 322 and the companion piece by Giacomo Colonna congratulating him on the coronation cited in the notes of most editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rvf. 322), “Se le parti del mio destrutte.” See also Petrarca, Collatio inter Scipionem Alexandrum Hanibalem et Pyrrum in Martellotti, Scritti petrarcheschi, pp. 321-46. 16 Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 308: “Many mighty men and warriors, and others who have deserved eternal memory have passed into oblivion simply because they had not the good fortune to be recorded by capable authors, as Horace says so well in his Odes: “Many mighty men lived before Agamemnon, but all are buried in a tearless night,” and the reason follows: “since they lack an inspired bard” (Horace, IV 9, 25-28). Certain illustrious men, foreseeing such a possibility, have kept poets with them and held them in high honor, so that there might be someone who would hand down their praises to posterity – a matter carefully set forth by Cicero in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias, to which I have already referred.” 17 As Luisa Secchi Tarugi rightly emphasizes, Petrarch wavers between otium and negotium, between withdrawn study and political and social passion, fully aware of the fundamental role of the intellectual in society. The idealized image of his humanist hero is a paradoxical mix of seemingly contradictory qualities, action and contemplation, public virtue and private diligence. Just such a figure makes an appearance in texts as early as his coronation oration of 1341. See Secchi Tarugi, Petrarca e l’umanesimo. 5 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Yet the value of solitude is not reserved for the poet in this ancient formulation of the equation. Solitude was seen as a precious resource even for the statesman. The very first exemplum from classical antiquity Petrarch places under the first subheading of the first book of his Rerum memorandarum libri, the one dedicated to the virtue of solitude, is none other than the great “solitudinis amator,” Scipio Africanus, who is not necessarily the first person you would associate to a life of withdrawal and studious leisure. The great general and man of action who worked to defeat Hannibal in the time of the Carthaginian threat was remembered even in antiquity as someone who cherished every precious moment he could spend some time alone with his thoughts as well as with his most trusted friends.18 This is what made him great. This is what makes him the paragon of Petrarch’s ideal humanist hero: someone who strikes the kind of balance between the active and the contemplative, the private and the public, that nevertheless leads him to great achievement on the stage of history. As it turns out, contrary to popular belief, Petrarch was much more than a sylvan love poet, the self-proclaimed solitary singer of Laura whose authorship of a tract on the virtues of the life of solitude is more nuanced and complex than a superficial reading might suggest. In fact, if we take a closer look at what Petrarch's De vita solitaria is all about I think we'll see just how idiosyncratic his early modern brand of humanism really is. Book II of the work opens with a long list of hermits. He tells us just enough about each of them to find out that they all have something paradoxical in common. Despite their withdrawal from the world of human affairs, they all earned great recognition and even fame in society. Some are more “famous” than others, but he ends his list with a slightly longer description of St. Anthony,19 the religious recluse par 18 Valerius Maximus, Chap. VIII, 8: “Since leisure appears to be diametrically opposed to diligence and study, it has the best claim to be subjoined to them, not leisure by which efficiency loses strength but by which it is revived. For the former is to be avoided even by the lazy, the latter is sometimes to be sought even by the energetic, so that as to the first they do not lead a life of perpetual inactivity, and as to the second that by timely intermission of work they may come the brisker to its resumption. / That illustrious pair of true friends, Scipio and Laelius, joined one to another by the bond of affection and also by partnership in all virtues, just as they followed the path of active life with equal tread, so did they find relief together in mental relaxations. For it is agreed that they used to pick up shells and pebbles wandering on the beaches of Caieta and Laurentum, and P. Crassus often declared that he had learned this from his his father-in-law Scaevola, who was Laelius’ son-in-law.” 19 Granted, some are more “famous” than others, but he ends his list with a longer biographical sketch of one of the most famous hermits of all Antonio, about whom he writes to Boccaccio in Sen. XVII, 2 in a 6 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu excellence who cultivated such a reputation for wisdom and restraint – earning for himself so much admiration and respect –, that he was even sought out by the emperors of Rome and invited into relationships of “amicitia” with them for the sage advice he could lavish on them. To anyone familiar with Petrarch's career not only as the solitary singer of Laura, but also as public intellectual, court advisor and diplomat, this might ring a bell. So much of this minihagiography resonates with Petrarch’s own biography right down to the word choice and focus on his relations with those in positions of power. In fact, he even goes on to emphasize the fact that Anthony found himself in such intimate interaction with the emperor that he exchanged “familiar” letters with them on a regular basis, as Petrarch himself did with dozens of the powerful figures not only in the papal court at Avignon, but also in the centers of power throughout Italy and across Europe.20 And so, as early as this late medieval moment of cultural transition and intellectual rebirth, the study of eloquence and philosophy – in short, the foundations of a liberal education – was intended for the betterment of society. The binary of contemplative and active was not a mutually exclusive one. And as we can see from his choice of examples, even the religious was not excluded from the realm of human concerns. It is no mystery then that Petrarch’s cultivation of the solitary life was never meant to be taken as an end in itself. As it was in antiquity and would be in the later tradition of Renaissance humanism, the studia humanitatis were always meant to bolster an individual’s participation and accomplishment in other areas of life. Time outside the fray spent learning in quiet contemplation, cultivating the self, is what gives the Petrarchan humanist the personal fortitude necessary for productive engagement with the world of human affairs. Petrarchan humanism synthesized the contemplative and the active lives. comparison between their humble friendship and the one cultivated between Anthony and St. Paul of Thebes (Paul the Theban). Theirs is another exemplary case of intimacy between hermits, humble men dedicated to learning and letters, with little in the way of earthly goods to their name. As if the two had anything to do with each other: riches and friendship. 20 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, II, i, chapter 2, p. 192: “I might go on to tell [...] how Roman Emperors, attracted by the miracle of his fame, addressed letters to him with the reverence due to a father and were immensely delighted when they were accorded the honor of a reply.” 7 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Petrarch's panegyric On the Solitary Life opens with an exhortation to the reader to cultivate their soul at least as much as they might busy themselves with a myriad other trifles in their daily lives. But what is the solitary life good for?21 First on the list is to serve God, which he deems the only truly free and happy occupation of our souls; next is to cultivate our ingegno, namely, our intellect, our creativity, our mind; lastly, it is for meditation and writing, for planning and creating something to leave behind for posterity to remember us by, and thus to stop the fleeing of time and lengthen our all too brief lives through creative output. And so he prescribes a venue for this brand of solitude that is conducive not only to introspection but also to culture. It should be a place friendly to books, since literary concerns should also be at the forefront of ones leisurely activities. He also makes it clear that by solitude he does not necessarily mean being always strictly alone, that kind of extreme solitude he calls inhuman. Further layering paradox upon paradox, for Petrarch, one should populate their solitude with choice company.22 “Besides,” he says, “I never persuaded those for whom I said solitude was advantageous that in their desire for solitude they should despise the laws of friendship. I bade them fly from crowds and not from friends. [...] Let his leisure be modest and gentle, not rude; let his solitude be tranquil, not savage; in short, let it be solitude and not barbarism.”23 Inhuman solitude is missing its “participe,” its companion, its friend. “It will never be my view,” he continues, “that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend, but that it is enriched. […] I would share my solitude like everything else with my friends, believing that Seneca spoke with true humanity when he said that ‘no good thing is pleasant to possess without friends to share it’ (Epistles, 6). Solitude is a great and sweet possession.”24 21 Petrarch, De vita solitaria, p. 327 22 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 24: “As is well known the ancients thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living. In holding this view they gave little consideration to the idea that we need the help of friends in misfortune; on the contrary, they rather thought that there can be no happiness or good fortune for anyone unless a friend shares in the joy of it.” 23 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 162. 24 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 163-5. 8 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu What is solitude with friends, this state of being “alone together,” but another of the classic oxymorons of Petrarchan poetics like the famous “icy fire,” “sugared grief” and “sour delight” of his love lyrics. The difference between extreme and inhuman solitude that desires only pure withdrawal and the more humane version that seeks not only to be alone but also to be in company, that wants to learn but also teach, to listen as well as speak, represents in the broadest sense one of the differences between Epicureanism and Stoicism. It’s a two-way road and which is where Seneca’s “humanius dictum,” his most human saying comes in: there is nothing worth having unless you have a friend (to enjoy it with you). By now it should be apparent that Petrarch has a very specific genealogy in mind when he extols the virtues of a life of solitary leisure. Never does it imply complete withdrawal from the activities of civic life. Instead, it implies the balanced approach one should take to the affairs of the society of man.25 Petrarch transforms retired leisure into a valuable life devoted to liberal studies and friendship. He says that he has yet to see any of his contemporaries (322, 326, 328) make a successful contribution to the public welfare. Those who devote themselves exclusively to public service risk losing control of their own lives, passions and minds. Hence his praise for Scipio Afrianus, the statesman who perfectly embodies, in Petrarch's view, the right balance of the active and the contemplative. With Petrarch the ethos of otium begins to transform the goal of everyday life into one involving self-knowledge and the cultivation of individual talents, a life populated by good friends and good books. 25 Sen. XVII, 3; Bernardo, p. 655: “[…] et occupatio mea maior et tempus angustum erat, idque ipsum, ut nosti, bellicis undique motibus inquietum, a quibus etsi animo procul absim, nequeo tamen fluctuante republica non moveri.” (Sen. XVII, 3, 1). He puts it rather poignantly in one of the Seniles he addresses to Boccaccio towards the end of his life. He sums up his attitude towards the balance between withdrawal and involvement thus: “[…] and at that, as you know, I was disturbed by war breaking our on all sides. Though I am far from sympathizing with it, I still cannot avoid being disturbed by the ups and downs of the republic.” Moments like this – and there are many, particularly as one delves deeper into his corpus of letters – show any picture of a happily withdrawn hermit Petrarch, quietly whittling away his days over his studies and at peace, to be overly optimistic. Instead, he was subject to all the fluctuations, upheavals and disorder that plagued Italy in the mid-fourteenth century. The contingencies of the historical moment in which he lived incessantly impinged on his living, no matter how much in his writings he is able to transcend to the timelessness that so much of what his writing has achieved, which is what made those precious moments of solitary peace and quiet all the more valuable. It is perhaps also fitting that these remarks regarding the patience required in order to maintain one’s soul at peace even in the face of adversity, in this case threats of violence and destruction with the outbreak of war menacing from all sides, are found in the prefatory remarks to the letter in which Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s Griselda is found. In some ways it could also give us some clues as to how Petrarch read the story of the steadfastness of Boccaccio’s “insigna uxor.” 9 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu “Whoever invades him in this retreat should have occasion to marvel that humanity, which is exiled from the cities, inhabits the wilderness and that while he has found bears and lions in populous places, in solitude he has discovered angelic man. Such is my feeling in the matter, and this I hold to be the middle of the road between the two extremes.”26 In the oasis of our universities these are the kind of qualities that we as liberal arts educators instill in our students, they are what will ultimately make our students more responsible citizens, pave the way to them becoming empowered leaders and lead them to live more rewarding richer lives. And so with Petrarch I say, “read the classics and be free.” It is the imaginative venture of Petrarchan leisure to allow private individuals, who are not necessarily religious contemplatives or philosophers, time to cultivate the virtues of a higher life of the mind and spirit. And that's what a liberal education is for: a socially mandated four years of retreat from the tempest of the world to do just this, so that no matter what they go on to do in life they will have the tools succeed when the tempest comes a calling as it always inevitably does. 26 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 162. 10 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 10 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fame and the solitary life : rethinking the liberal arts through the paradoxes of Petrarchan humanism Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Steve Baker at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baker, Steve J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004519 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f18c6ec3677799e518ad0bac92c54268.pdf fca3565912f5ab3287e95c0343e60aef PDF Text Text “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue: Discussing Anselm’s Proslogion in the Religiously Pluralist Classroom” Christopher Denny, Associate Professor, St. John’s University—NY 1. Introduction I begin by asking for the inspiration of Anselm of Canterbury, taking a cue from the meditative prayer in chapter one of his Proslogion. If I was fortunate enough to have Anselm speak in my place this morning, I can imagine him saying, “Come now, conference participants! Let us flee for a while from the cares of academic specializations and research and publication protocols, casting aside these burdensome pursuits. Let us set aside time to enter the inner chambers of our classrooms and particular institutions, and there seek a pedagogical rationale for reading, discussing, and teaching religious texts within a liberal arts curriculum. For if we cannot offer a sustained and principled defense of the value of studying religion and theology in colleges and universities dedicated to free inquiry about fundamental existential questions, where will such intellectual practices occur?” “But alas! wretched as we are, those of us intent on preserving a place for theological inquiries in higher education are bowed down in the current educational context. For both vocal secular critics of religion and pious caretakers of religion have replaced the search for ‘that than which-nothing greater can be conceived’ with the conviction that religion and piety are primarily reified markers of personal and collective identity. Be it our goal to look past these assumptions and set our sights upon the search for the truth, wherever truth leads us.” �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 2 The secularization of American higher education, and the accompanying marginalization of theological study in college and university curricula, is a process that has been occurring for centuries, as George Marsden noted in his book The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.1 The causes for this marginalization begin with the desire of Protestant denominations in the colonial and Federal periods to downplay creedal disagreements among themselves. They continue during Americanized Romanticera attempts to locate the essence of Christian religion in interiorized piety and whiggish notions of progress, and reach a culmination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century initiatives to situate the university within a scientific paradigm in which achievement is gauged in terms of empirical measurement and technological ability. Marsden and other commentators have rehearsed this history in detail, and for many it may be a cause for commiseration. My purpose, however, is neither to bemoan these changes nor to praise them as the acme of modern liberalism. Rather I intend to argue that the secularization of Christian colleges and universities opens up new opportunities for reintroducing theology into the liberal arts curriculum in a religiously pluralist rather than in a confessionalist context. To illustrate these possibilities, I employ Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion as a test case, relying both on the text itself and also upon the historical environment within which the Proslogion was written, for Anselm too faced a profound shift in educational ideals during his day, and his writings indicate a need to confront a new See George Marsden, The Soul of the University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 1 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 3 audience in the emerging scholastic classroom and a new method of doing theology. Rather than denouncing the transformation that theology underwent as it expanded beyond the monasteries, Anselm retooled theology. Liberal-arts practitioners and theologians would do well to follow his example. 2. Increasing Professional and Religious Pluralism in Anselm’s Context Recent scholarship in medieval educational history has supplemented an earlier focus on the role of Benedictine monasticism with greater attention to the importance of cathedral schools and the Ottonian and Salian imperial courts in fostering an approach to philosophy centered upon the study of Cicero’s oratory and service to the state. Stephen Jaeger’s recent study of primary source documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries challenges medieval histories of the liberal arts that marginalize contributions from outside the sphere of monastic education.2 A figure such as the monk-scholar Gerbert of Aurillac, for example, straddles the boundary between religious and secular education. Having left his position as abbot of the monastery of Bobbio, Gerbert spent his days teaching arts and rhetoric, until receiving the patronage of Emperor Otto III, with whose support Gerbert became Pope Sylvester II in the year 999. In his work On the Rational and the Use of Reason, Gerbert promoted a so-called “imperial philosophy” (imperialis philosophia), in which the logic and dialectic of Aristotle and Boethius were placed at the service of Otto’s court. While Gerbert had learned grammar at the monastery of Aurillac, his 2 See C. Stephen Jaeger, “Philosophy, ca. 950—ca. 1050, Viator 40/1 (2009): 17-40. �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 4 own introduction to logic came during his time at the imperial court and at the cathedral school at Reims studying with the teacher Gerannus.3 Although logic in these decades remained subordinate to a practical understanding of the liberal arts as a benefit for a career in secular administration, over time the influence of the cathedral schools filtered back into monastic settings, including the monastery at Bec where Anselm taught. Anselm’s teacher Lanfranc was a key figure in this development. Having come to this new monastery after studies in the liberal arts and law, as prior Lanfranc began to admit students who were not planning to enter a monastery, either at Bec or elsewhere, in order to raise money for the abbey.4 By the late eleventh century, a number of these students at Bec had entered administrative careers, bolstered by their studies in history and law.5 Anselm’s resuscitation of the literary dialogue in medieval Latin literature needs to be interpreted against this shift in the student population at Bec. Even though Anselm eventually reversed Lanfranc’s decision to admit external students at Bec, the use of dialogue manifest in Anselm’s early work De Grammatico (On See Richer of Saint-Rémi, Histories [3.45], vol. 2, ed. and trans. Justin Lake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 66—71. 4 See Alex J. Novikoff, “Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” Speculum 86 (2011): 387—418. The primary sources dealing with Lanfranc’s education, including the biographical material from Milo Crispin and Gilbert Crispin, are surveyed in H. E. J. Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5—10. 5 See Sally N. Vaughn, “Anselm, Lanfranc, and the School of Bec: Searching for the Students of Bec,” in The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell, ed. Marc A. Meyer (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 155—81. Also, see Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 3 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 5 Grammar) endured in his later theological dialogues, most notably Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Human?]6 Even an early work of Anselm’s such as the Proslogion, which is not composed in the genre of a formal dialogue with different literary characters, displays the transition from soliloquy towards dialogue and argument in the response that it generated and Anselm’s rejoinder. In the preface to this work, Anselm describes it as an alloquium, an address or allocution. In his later response to Gaunilo, however, Anselm appeals to those who have knowledge of disputandi argumentandique (debating, discussing, proving, arguing) to come to his defense against Gaunilo’s objections.7 Indeed Anselm’s entire literary output displays an evolution in the direction of debate, and there are for Anselm culpable and praiseworthy debaters. For example, in the beginning of his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, Anselm distinguishes between the arguments of those who proudly deny what their intellects cannot grasp and the arguments of those who humbly live the Christian faith.8 By the time Anselm wrote the later Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Human], he no longer waits for the response from the likes of Gaunilo as he explicitly anticipates debate and organizes the first part of the dialogue around meeting the “objections of unbelievers.”9 Novikoff criticizes Richard Southern’s lack of appreciation of Anselm’s debt to Lanfranc on this point. See Novikoff, “Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” 405. 7 See Anselm, Reply to Gaunilo 7. 8 See Anselm, On the Incarnation of the Word 1. 9 See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, preface and 1. 6 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 6 3. Reading the Proslogion with Awareness of Religious Pluralism Interpretive awareness of Anselm’s transitional educational context helps to balance understandings of the Proslogion that reduce this work to an exercise in a completely interiorized version of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. The Proslogion certainly qualifies as such a search but one that is neither solipsistic nor exclusivist. Rather, once we know more about Anselm’s historical context, we can appreciate that Anselm’s search in the Proslogion is marked by an environment of religious pluralism and debates, but not debates that mirror our contemporary polemics between religious believers and skeptics. First, Anselm wrote this treatise against the background of the intra-Christian schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople that occurred in 1054, and the result of that schism continued to influence Anselm’s theological career, as he gave an address at the Council of Bari in 1098 crafted to convince Eastern Christians of the Latin doctrine of the trinitarian filioque, the procession of the Son from the Holy Spirit as well as from the Father. Second, Anselm was part of a generation of Christian theologians who were coming into increased contact with anti-Christian polemical works by non-Christian authors, much of which was in dialogue form. The Account of the Disputation of the Priest, a ninth-century Jewish text, is an example of this genre. The Account attacks the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation on the grounds that the divine nature is incompatible with such a religious teaching. At the beginning of his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, Anselm refers to the writings of his fellow scholastic Roscelin, who at the Council of Soissons in 1092 was accused by Anselm and others of teaching tritheism. Roscelin’s nominalist �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 7 contention that the persons of the Trinity must be separate substances in order to avoid admitting that the Father and the Spirit would also have had to become incarnate alongside the Son is found in a work attributed to one of his contemporaries, the Islamic theologian al-Ghazālī. A dialogue format was precluded in On the Incarnation of the Word, as the work was addressed directly to Pope Urban II, but later in the dialogue Cur Deus Homo Anselm’s interlocutor Boso praises Anselm’s arguments for the Incarnation, claiming that it should serve as proof for Jews and pagans.10 Twentieth-century philosophers and theologians have split much ink and typeface over the issue of whether the Proslogion is an exercise in natural theology or, as twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth held, a priori theological support for those already initiated.11 One contemporary interpreter outlines such a dichotomous choice as follows: Loyalty to Christian identity remained for Anselm the first responsibility of theological interpretation and the only authentic basis for theological reasoning. Anselm would not have shared the belief that a progressive and sure epistemological foundation was at hand, immanently accessible, to which he could lead the unbeliever and from which they could share common assumptions.12 See Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav, 1977), 121—25; al-Ghazālī, Réfutation Excellente de la Divinité de Jesus-Christ d’après les Évangiles, ed. and trans. Robert Chidiac (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 2.22. 11 See Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. I. W. Robertson (London: SCM, 1960). 12 Jeffrey C. Pugh, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm as Contemporary,” Theology Today 55/1 (April 1998): 35—45, at 43. Later in the article Pugh writes, “Seeking to justify itself within its cultural context, it [theology] runs the risk of connecting its theology so strongly to the culture that its construals of God will diminish when the cultural forms it arose within pass into yet another” (44). By contrast, I hold with Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904—84) that “A theology mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.” 10 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 8 I must simply disagree. For Anselm, the criterion of theology is first and foremost the truth of God rather than the maintenance of religious identity, which is a derivative issue. Moreover, the narrator’s self-understanding shifts in the course of the Proslogion’s first chapter, as I will argue momentarily. Debates over the role of reason versus faith in the Proslogion would assume a helpful new guise if Anselm’s original audience was taken into account. Anselm was not addressing a group of eighteenth-century deists. Theology and philosophy, and the accompanying distinction between natural and supernatural knowledge, were not as clearly distinct as they would become some two centuries after his time. The fool he references from Psalms 14 and 53 does not provide a clear-cut case of religious atheism but according to the psalmist, an example of moral corruption. The pressing concern in the opening chapters of the Proslogion is what kind of god God is, a more intelligible concern given the religious differences in Anselm’s context. Let’s see what a reading of the opening chapters of the Proslogion can look like through an interreligiously informed hermeneutic. Anselm concludes chapter one with a quotation from Isaiah: “unless I believe, I will not understand” (nisi credidero, non intelligam; Is 7:9). This well-known verse is also included in Anselm’s letter to Pope Urban II at the beginning of his work On the Incarnation of the Word and clearly served as a guiding principle in his writings; it is often used as support for a fideist approach to the Proslogion.13 Yet there are Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), xi. 13 See Anselm, On the Incarnation of the Word 1. �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 9 too many other passages in Anselm’s writings that appeal to rational persuasion of non-Christians for readers to stretch Anselm’s citation of this verse into a global epistemological principle that would hold good for all persons.14 Anselm himself may begin reasoning from a position of religious faith, but many of his readers have not. The second chapter’s famous definition of God as “that-than-which-a-greatercannot-be-thought” acquires a different cast when it is accepted as a premise about God than as a self-evident proof or, as Kant held, an exercise in trying to derive existence from reasoning, a charge that would be better leveled against the argument for God in Descartes’s Third Meditation.15 As Katherin Rogers notes, Anselm’s theological premises are intended to achieve two goals at the same time: first, deepening the religious belief of insider participants, and second, persuading outsiders.16 While this definition of God is not separable from the religious belief of insiders, neither is it a neutral lowest common denominator. Since the definition is at its root apophatic, God as “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” by itself In addition to Cur Deus Homo 2.22, for another example see On the Incarnation of the Word 6. 15 Anselm, Proslogion 2, trans. M. J. Charlesworth, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87; see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A592/B620— A602/B630. A critique of Kant’s rejection of the “ontological argument” is given by Pugh, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum.” 16 See Katherin Rogers, “Can Christianity Be Proven? St. Anselm of Canterbury on Faith and Reason,” in Anselm Studies 2, eds. Joseph C. Schnaubelt et al. (Kraus International, 1988), 459-479, at 466. Also, note Brian Davies, “Anselm and the Ontological Argument,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, eds. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157—77, at 174— 76. 14 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 10 reveals no positive content about God or about the image of God.17 The premise is analogous to the limit of a convergent mathematical sequence, especially given Anselm’s further assertion in chapter fifteen that God is “something greater than can be thought.”18 Human thoughts can approach God by way of comparison in the manner of a geometric asymptote, tending toward but never attaining identity with the divine. This apophatic claim therefore is also comparative, as the existence of God is only indirectly revealed by comparison with other thoughts. While the thoughts of Anselm and other religious participants are in large part determined by the specific content of their respective traditions, exemplified in the opening chapter of the Proslogion, the advantage of Anselm’s premise in chapter two for interreligious dialogue and debate is that this apophatic definition of God is not confined within any particular network of signs, symbols, or doctrines. Critics can rightly note that this apophatic approach means that the question of God’s existence is not one of evidence or of ontology, as pace many subsequent interpreters Anselm does not equate God with Being or with Existence. This is true, but this is precisely what lends Anselm’s misleadingly called ontological argument strength in a religiously pluralistic context. If the issue of God’s existence were to be settled by evidence empirical or metaphysical in nature, then the argument would necessarily acquire an esoteric character. If God were the same type of being as the hypothetical island that Anselm’s interlocutor Gaunilo posited in his short treatise On Behalf of the Fool, then the Proslogion could only be convincing to readers who Readers of Anselm’s Proslogion know that after chapter five there are several chapters characterizing God’s qualities, although these are followed by chapter fifteen’s assertion that God is greater than can be thought. 18 Anselm, Proslogion, 15, in Anselm of Canterbury, 96. 17 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 11 shared Anselm’s esoteric knowledge, a functional example here of what Gotthold Lessing termed “the accidental truths of history.”19 This would be the case with any knowledge received solely from scripture, tradition, or ecclesiastical authority. In assessing Anselm’s argument, Gaunilo was searching for categorical evidence to correspond to the idea of “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought.” Finding no such correspondence, Gaunilo rejected the argument. In the Proslogion’s opening soliloquy, Anselm himself had pursued this course before shifting his focus. In chapter one, Anselm laments that visual confirmation of God’s existence is not forthcoming, writing: “By what signs, under what aspect, shall I seek you? Never have I seen you, Lord my God, I do not know Your face. . . . What shall Your servant do, tormented by love of You and cast off ‘far from Your face’ [Ps. 31:22]?”20 Unlike Gaunilo, however, Anselm’s consciousness of his wretched state moves him from seeking a vision towards recognizing his desire to encounter God, and Clive Barrett notes how the language in the opening chapter of Proslogion shifts from vision to conception as the prayer proceeds.21 Anselm prays, “I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves.”22 Colin Grant noted that for Anselm “the existence of God is a question of meaning, not of evidence”; this opening prayer marks a shift towards interiority and fixes meaning within the speaker’s desire for God, a desire See Gotthold Lessing, On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, trans. Henry Chadwick (London: A. & C. Black, 1956), 51—53. 20 Anselm, Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury, 85. 21 See Clive Barrett, “A Careful Reading of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument,” Philosophy and Theology 23/2 (2011): 217—30, at 220. 22 Anselm Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury, 87, 19 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 12 that impels Anselm to think in a comparative manner that aims at constant transcendence of particular entities.23 Interpreted in this light, chapters one and two of Proslogion represent Anselm’s own liberation from what we can call the “epistemology of the fool” as defended by the likes of Gaunilo. The fool is one who does not make the transformation from exterior images to recognition of one’s internal neediness and desire for God, one who does not enter “into the chamber of your soul (in cubiculum mentis tuae)” to which Anselm alludes in chapter one of the Proslogion. The meaning that the idea of God holds for the thinker, however, is not to be equated with a subjectivist frame of reference, as if Anselm’s assertion in chapter two that to exist jointly in the mind and in reality is greater than merely mental existence specifically because of the power of the human mind. That would be to mistake Anselm for a modern philosophical idealist in the manner of someone like J. G. Fichte. Nor is meaning in Anselm’s sense of that word defined by a constructivist epistemological paradigm in which individual choice is the root variable that determines meaning. At the beginning of chapter three, Anselm claims “that-thanwhich-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” “cannot even be thought not to exist.”24 To his thinking the very process of thought compels the thinker and directs the mind towards a definite conclusion. In a contemporary world in which religious belief and unbelief hide behind terms of values and identity in order to avoid intellectual scrutiny, Anselm’s assertion relativizes without homogenizing the starting points of See Colin Grant, “Anselm’s Argument Today,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57/4 (Winter 1989): 791—806, at 794. 24 Anselm, Proslogion, 3 in Anselm of Canterbury, 88. 23 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 13 the Proslogion’s stakeholders in light of an external standard of measurement that the author regards as self-evident. This is the mirror image of much contemporary religious agnosticism, in which believers and unbelievers homogenize their differences by subsuming them beneath a functional antinomy of sorts, a socialized framework of tolerance in which each side agrees that it must disagree with the other side because no rational conclusion can be reached. 4. Conclusion The possibility for a discussion about the Proslogion among Christians and non-Christians and among religious believers, religious non-believers, and religiously uncommitted students hinges upon mutual willingness to embrace what Gyula Klima has called “constitutive reference” as opposed to “parasitic reference.” The latter option is a staple in the methodological naturalism that reigns in the social sciences and the humanities in the contemporary academy. When we refer to an entity parasitically, we do so by reference to what others think about that entity without sharing in their conceptions about it. Constitutive reference by contrast is the act by which we intentionally refer to an entity by the mental description that we ourselves have of that entity, without such a description being determined by reference to other people’s thoughts.25 Much could be said about the logical and epistemological consequences of this distinction in reading Anselm. For my purposes, I would like to call attention to the implications of this distinction for a religiously pluralist classroom. To read Anselm “constitutively” rather than See Gyuma Klima, “Saint Anselm’s Proof: A Problem of Reference, Intentional Identity and Mutual Understanding,” in Medieval Philosophy and Modern Times, ed. Ghita Holmström-Hintikka (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), 69—87, at 77—83. 25 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 14 “parasitically” in this case means that teachers and students engage Anselm’s argument directly rather than burying it beneath historicist and theological assumptions that exemplify parasitic references. Examples of such parasitic references would be shoehorning the Proslogion into a mold of medieval thought or a mold of exclusively Christian philosophy or theology. Parasitic references can also be determined not by the text itself but by the academic setting in which we read Anselm, when for example the Proslogion is characterized predominantly as part of the Great Books heritage or the Roman Catholic tradition, or as a medieval classic. The Proslogion is part of all these groupings, but to leave off at that point marks a failure to address Anselm’s claims on their own merits. Some may fault my thesis as paying short shrift to the communal context within which books are read. That is a point worthy of further discussion. While the communal and ecclesial presumptions with which we read Anselm are important and inevitably influence our reading of his texts, I think that those assumptions become debilitating when they are determinative of our readings, especially in educational contexts in which formerly confessional or religiously orthodox institutions have transformed themselves into more pluralist and secular schools. I do not claim that this development has been a positive one on balance, but as Marsden notes, it has happened whether religious believers like it or not. Given his willingness to engage religious outsiders real and imagined in his own era, Anselm provides twenty-first century students with a model for how creedal belief �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 15 and sincere dialogue can coexist in the university classroom nine centuries after his time.26 26 I give thanks to Mr. Paul Rezkalla for research assistance with this paper. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 15 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From doubt and decline towards dialogue : discussing Anselm's Proslogion in the religiously pluralist classroom Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Christopher Denny at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Denny, Christopher D. (Christopher Douglas) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1033-1109. Proslogion. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004527 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0df0a4ae974316e995debf1ab5686ba5.pdf e38b1d2f0079bf80536626efd516e4a6 PDF Text Text 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 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Having the capacity for theoretical reason Description An account of the resource 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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Speliotis, Evanthia Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004551 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9c5aafb67769634f5f5871b56dcec9b1.pdf be6a9bfb24f51a321802bc1f64061640 PDF Text Text ����������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 11 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Heideggerian perfectionism and the phenomenology of the pedagogical truth event Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Iain Thomson at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Thomson, Iain D. (Iain Donald), 1968- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004553 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7674b113f1cc3c70ab0d4d495e314b1c.pdf 46c0db3b85d72874a00ce3a68eff3df6 PDF Text Text Helen’s Eidolon: Learning and Suffering in Euripides’ Electra A work of tragic poetry is organized by its teleology of suffering, by the sense it gives of why humans suffer. The chorus of Argive Elders in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon tells the audience that “Zeus, who brought men to think...has laid it down that learning comes alone through suffering.” (Ag. 177-8) and also “justice so inclines that those only learn who suffer” (Ag. 2501). We suffer for the sake of learning, and moreover, there is no other way to learn. The Oresteia as a whole seems to bear this out. We follow the house of Atreus through intense suffering: adultery, child murder, cannibalism, the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, a decade of war, the murder of Agamemnon, the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and finally, the guilt of matricide. Yet in the end justice is not only done, it is established on earth for the first time in an institution, the Areopagus. Law is born from violence. The furies are transformed to Eumenides. We have learned. We have become more civilized. Euripides’ plays do not support this teleology of suffering. In fact, Euripides inverts the Aeschylean formula in his Electra. Orestes says to his sister, Electra, before she recognizes him, that “there is no pity in ignorance, but [pity is present] in the wise among men. But too wise knowledge in the wise is not harmless.” (El. 294-6) While suffering can bring learning according to Aeschylus’ chorus, learning brings new suffering born of pity for Euripides’ Orestes. In other words, we do not transcend suffering through learning, we simply acquire more of it. For Euripides, there is no threshold beyond suffering, no end to redeem it. As we will see, suffering does not educate Electra or Orestes, it harms and deludes them. I. When we meet Electra, our titular character, she bears a heavy water pot on her head and laments dramatically, “O night, black night whose breast nurses the golden stars/ I wander through your darkness,” (54-55) We know at this point that she has been cast out of the royal house and is married to a farmer. Now she seems to be reduced to menial labor and we begin to feel pity. But this pity is undermined immediately: as she says, “I am not forced, I chose this slavery myself” (57) She is soon spotted by her new husband, the farmer and he asks her why she insists on doing heavy labor. The orders do not come from him. Electra does not have to bear the heavy water jar but chooses to: the action of the play opens with a self-pitying stunt. As she says herself, she wants to make Aegisthus’ arrogance visible by making her situation look worse than it actually is. Strange logic. Electra refuses to attend the festival of Hera on account of her clothes and even refuses the chorus’ offer of loaned garments to enforce her image of suffering (167-174). Later, Electra insists on showing herself as a slave to her mother, Clytemnestra, by offering to help her out of her carriage when her own Trojan slaves are suddenly absent (1004). Electra compares herself to the Trojan women brought back as slaves. Yet her situation is actually much different. She is still on Mycaenean soil, still able to live and die there and to worship the gods of her people. She is poor, but she is as free as she was before. She freely chooses to engage in conspicuous labors. Throughout, Electra willfully refuses to see anything in her situation but misery. She takes actions to make her situation look worse, to make things appear to others as they appear to her. By contrast, Sophocles’ Electra is portrayed as a victim with great inner strength. Her hate may terrify us, but it is understandable: she is trapped in a house with her father’s killers and subject to daily abuses. Euripides’ Electra may feel exiled and trapped in her poverty but �ultimately, her complaints appear shallow and materialistic. She is removed from any ongoing abuse and allowed a simple, honest life, the sort that Socrates’ Odysseus chooses for himself in the Myth of Er. The fact that she is constantly trying to make her rustic situation look like slavery is the surest proof that it could be borne more easily. Electra’s desire for revenge springs from two places, both delusions: her sense that the loss of her royal wealth harms her and her idealized love for the father she hardly knew, Agamemnon. These two causes are similar insofar as both are what we, after Marx, might call fetishes. When Electra mentions Aegisthus, the man who deposed her father, she says “[I] cry my pain to father in the great bright air” (59) She will mention Agamemnon again and again, idealizing him and stoking her rage for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. But always her rage strikes a hollow note. Euripides systematically withholds a good reason for her point of view. She has been forced out of her house and married to a farmer, a great indignity that seems to have no precedent in the other tellings of this story. Yet what seems like a brutal blow that might presage her inevitable revenge is in fact an oddly good turn of fortune. Her farmer husband, despite his poverty, is a thoughtful, upright man who will not touch her and cares for her like a father. In fact, he cares for her better than the father she lost and now idealizes, Agamemnon. She notes how the farmer is “equal to the gods in kindness” (67) but when alone she laments her situation in high tragic tone. This introduces us to a dissonance that runs throughout the play between the way Electra and Orestes view the situation and the circumstances themselves. Euripides steadily erodes any clear moral imperative to revenge that the two children might have. While Aeschylus presents us an Orestes who is reluctant because he understands how serious his task is, Euripides presents Orestes as confused and lacking resolve. Aeschylus’ Orestes finally acts out of a deep piety, an understanding that the will of the gods, presented in the oracle, cannot be evaded. Hard as it is, he recognizes a greater plan at work. By contrast, Euripides’ Orestes acts when he is hounded into it by his deluded sister. He doubts the oracle, insisting that no god could ask him to kill his mother (970, 981).Electra insists the oracle must be true, but not out of any piety, for we have seen none in her, but because it serves her end. Orestes is driven to act when Electra accuses him of cowardice and forces him, out of petulance, to disprove her. No line better indicates Orestes’ combination of cowardice and blind trust in Electra than when he says, “what is our action now toward our mother? Do we kill?” (967) Even when he strikes, Orestes cannot face his mother, so he covers his eyes with his cloak (1221). He demands someone else deal with the corpse, wrapping it in the same cloak he used to cover his eyes from the deed (1227). Electra then wraps the corpse. All this underlines that he is ultimately presented as a tool of Electra’s hatred which, as we have seen, is hardly justified by the events and people of the play. Whatever obvious status the matricidal revenge had within the mythic canon has been wholly dispelled: Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are presented as flawed but reasonable, the murders as unmotivated. To drive this home, Euripides has both murders appear exceedingly cruel and impious.1 Aegisthus is killed while attending to a sacrificed bull. As he leans over and sorts through the organs, Orestes smashes his spine with a sword blow from behind. Clytemnestra is lured through a false rumor that Electra is giving birth. She shows genuine maternal interest in Electra and the 1 Froma Zeitlin, explores Euripides’ inversion of religious rites throughout the play: ”Celebration has proved an illusion and ritual sacrifice has become murder.” [Zeitlin, F. “The Argive Festival of Hera and Euripides’ Electra.” In: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. Vol. 101, (1970) p. 659.] Most readings of this strange play (Conacher, Denniston, Pohlenz, Spira, Barlow, Thury) struggle to fit it into standard ideas of tragedy and so ignore some aspect of the unforgiving portrayal Euripides offers us. �baby. She begs for her life. Both victims are vulnerable and have tried to explain themselves and their actions in reasonable terms. We do not have the intense, gloating Clytemnestra or tyrannical Aegisthus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. We know that, according to the story, they must be killed. Where both Aeschylus and Sophocles build the case for the murder slowly and build the tension so that the act becomes inevitable, Euripides slackens the dramatic tension so that the murders appear not as revenge but as horror. Several signs indicate that the murders might have been avoided, perhaps not ultimately, but at least on these terms and by these means. Had Electra recognized that her situation was not as bad as she desired it to be or had Orestes the coward not been stung by the accusation of cowardice to abandon his justified doubt in the oracle, the murders would not have happened or would have waited on better motivations and perhaps been achieved by less brutal means. Castor and Pollux, gods and Orestes’ and Electra’s uncles, appear at the end of the play to resolve the action and remark, provocatively, that Apollo “knows the truth but his oracles were lies.” (1246) and that “Justice has claimed [Clytemnestra] but you have not worked in justice.” (1244).” Euripides presents the murders more as a result of Electra’s self-deception than any greater justice. The events of the play hinge on Electra’s greedy self-pity. Here, Zeus and Apollo weave their fate through such strange means that divine necessity appears like a bizarre mistake issuing from one person’s damaged psyche. II. Euripides’ treatment of the subject confuses the effect of the tragedy considerably. August Wilhelm Schlegel called Euripides’ Electra “a singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical, perversity.”2 Consider how Euripides handles the Aeschylean trope of Electra recognizing Orestes from his footprint’s similarity to hers. An old man tries to convince her that Orestes has returned but she stubbornly refuses to believe it: “You make me angry. How could rocky ground receive/ the imprint of a foot? and if it could be traced,/ it would not be the same for a brother and for sister, a man’s foot and a girl’s- of course it would be bigger.” (534-537) Euripides invites us to think about the unrealistic nature of the Aeschylean trope and even to laugh at it.3 An uncomfortable comic self-awareness bursts through the tragic artifice. This and moments like it are surely the target of Schlegel’s critique. And he is right, the Electra is a perverse play and barely resembles classic tragedy. But this does not mean it fails to achieve its intended effect. Because the character portrayals erode any self-understood moral high ground which might generate clear feelings of pity and fear, it must fail to satisfy the idea of tragedy as catharsis. The play is unfulfilling when judged as catharsis. But Aristotle, in his Poetics does not rest on the idea of cleansing or purification but builds, dialectically, toward “ekplexis” astonishment by knocking away what we think we know. Euripides’ Electra does this admirably, in that we steadily watch our ideas about the story and the tragic theater crumble away. We are 2 Lectures on Dramatic Art, Lecture IX. Schlegel also notes that in the Electra Euripides initiated the decline of “not only this or that genre, but [of the Greek’s] entire existence, in all arts, in constitution and laws, in private and public customs and actions.” 3 Electra recognizes Orestes by a scar instead, a nod, perhaps, to Eurykleia’s recognition of Odysseus in the Odyssey. Homer’s world is broad enough to embrace the serious and the comic, the fated and the incidental. If Euripides rejects Aeschylus, perhaps he does not reject Homer. Perhaps he means to pick up another, neglected thread in the Mythoi. �brought to question the characters and their motives and to wonder if there was any greater reason, plan, justice or purpose driving the action at all. It is, then, no accident that at the end of the play, Castor and Pollux, Helen’s brothers, remind us: “[Helen] never went to Troy. Zeus fashioned and dispatched a Helen-image there/ to Ilium so men might die in hate and blood.” (1281-3) Beginning at least with Stesichorus, some ancient Greek authors, including Herodotus, tell the story of the Trojan War with an important variation: Helen never really went to Ilium. 4 An Eidolon, a likeness of her, went instead while she was kept in Egypt for the duration of the war. Euripides seems to be the only tragedian to take this narrative variation up. In fact, he returns to it again and again. It is a leitmotif for him. It plays center stage in his Helen but also surfaces in the Electra. Why mention Helen’s Eidolon toward the end of the Electra? It seems to me that it serves to underscore the hollowness of human action. If the whole Trojan war was undertaken for a phantom, what of the miseries that come to the royal house of Atreus? Could they also be based on a misunderstanding? All this suffering is for an image, it has no real purpose, no achievable aim. Revenge, like war, is undertaken for a shadow.5 Seen this way, the Electra is not so much tragedy as black comedy.6 In the end, we have a sinking feeling that the whole thing could have been avoided, a feeling that is completely out of place in the tragic theater. Castor and Pollux tell Orestes and Electra: “Justice has claimed her but you have not worked in justice.” (1244) In the end, justice has been done, but we cannot enjoy it. This is a cardinal sin for a playwright, to refuse us our enjoyment, and Euripides’ Electra is roundly hated by critics for it. The Dioscuri reveal what Electra and Orestes have in store for them but there is no sense of future triumph in the court decision that will liberate Orestes from the furies. It is telling that the transformation of furies to Eumenides is not mentioned at all. This transformation is the crowning moment of the Oresteia and the proof that suffering leads to a better life. Euripides just lets the furies pass without fanfare: in killing Clytemnestra there was no victory to celebrate and there is no future victory to come. There is no Helen to retrieve. The dramatic work, instead of giving us a convincing, self-enclosed world, leaves us unsure and unsatisfied. It does this, in part, by failing to be a good tragedy. The work does not 4 Plato, Phaedrus 243a-b. Herodotus argues that Homer knew this variation as well, evidenced by his mention of Paris’ detour to Egypt in Book V of the Iliad. Homer chose not to use the Phantom Helen variation, according to Herodotus, because it did not fit as well with an epic poem. Herodotus, Histories II.116. More, to Herodotus the variation seems to be as old as the event of the Trojan War itself and to have been preserved in this variant form by the Egyptians. Herodotus’ reasons for accepting the Phantom Helen story told by the Egyptian priests cluster around the fact that it would have been “insane” for the Trojans to refuse to give her back to Menelaus. Thus they must not have had her. See Histories II.120. 5 What Euripides highlights, how the particular delusions connected to a situation of violence undermine any justice or moral clarity it might have, offers an elenchus, a refutation, of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. As with the socratic elenchus the point is not to come to new knowledge but to expose ignorance. And as Socrates’ interlocuters learn, the emotions that attend being refuted are unpleasant. 6 Schlegel notes what is obvious to most readers, that the Electra seems strangely close to comedy: “I could wish that the wedding of Pylades had been celebrated on the stage, and that a good round sum of money had been paid to the peasant on the spot; then everything would have ended to the satisfaction of the spectators as in an ordinary comedy.” (Lecture IX) The blurring of comedy and tragedy was probably deliberate. Euripides undertakes it in other plays as well. �magically transmute its suffering into pleasure, its furies pass away but are not transformed. The Electra performs for the theatergoer what Euripides’ other plays indicate: there is no redeeming purpose to our suffering. This is a hard lesson for liberal education to incorporate. If Euripides is right, education will not make our lives better. It will not make us happier or more self-actualized. It will find its own way to contribute to our suffering. Suffering will not teach us or improve us but will only warp our perception of the world. We could say, looking at the concluding moments of Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae that suffering, though it has no redeeming cosmic purpose, teaches us compassion for one another. When characters at the close of those plays recognize they have all suffered immensely at the hands of inscrutable gods, they forgive one another. A human community of compassion springs up in response to the absurdity of divine power. Yet here in the Electra, we do not have such a reconciliation. Apollo is blamed, the brother and sister will be pardoned. But they have not learned anything, not even how to suffer well. We are not graced with the benediction of the Eumenides. Orestes runs off, pursued by the furies and the Dioscuri fly away to Sicily to “rescue the salt smashed prows of the fleet” (1348), a reference, perhaps, to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition which Thucydides called “a destruction so complete [the report] was not thought credible.”7 This gives a reminder to the Athenian audience of contemporary suffering and the fruitlessness of war. 8 After such a dark reminder, the hollow, programmatic words pronounced by the chorus to close the play seem more like gallows humor than good advice: “Farewell. The mortal who can fare well not broken by the trouble met on the road, leads a most blessed life.” Andy Davis Belmont University 7 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 8.1. See Richmond Lattimore’s note on the chronology of Euripides’ plays in Euripides V. 8 Aeschylus, while exploring and probing the Trojan war, gives us a trilogy that ultimately justifies war. Euripides’ Electra, on the other hand, does not. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. 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Title A name given to the resource Helen's eidolon : learning and suffering in Euripides' Electra Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Andy Davis at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Davis, Andy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Euripides. Electra Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004525 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f0ce4bfc7fc3aa6e37ec4ce2e0b8dbcb.pdf ee42cd1cff3e384d4cd950b33f0e203d PDF Text Text 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) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 11 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Homer's polytheism Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Julie Park at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Park, Julie C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Homer -- Religion Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004549 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e304be807775f10edd85a08225e73289.pdf 77b7f80c0bdf84d58ba425175d77dc01 PDF Text Text 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. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource In the middle of a conversation : reflections on Ortega y Gasset's "The misery and splendor of translation" Description An account of the resource 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Longwaters, Kathleen Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Ortega y Gasset, José, 1883-1955. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004543 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/237af66d74c0ed8fea660d91a569b760.pdf 31a551f334dc8cb2f519290a32682d72 PDF Text Text [键入文字] 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. �[键入文字] (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. �[键入文字] 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 �[键入文字] 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 �[键入文字] 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 �[键入文字] 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 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 13 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Insights into the essence of general education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Pang Haishao at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Haishao, Pang Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004542 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac43c2ffc0e5faed93b9d3084695047d.pdf fdc2be4b1f7827002e0a875d2c004417 PDF Text Text Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education Daniel R. DeNicola Gettysburg College (This paper is essentially a distillation of my recent book by the same title. This seems appropriate, not only because—judging from sales—it is unlikely you have read the book, not only because it references St. John’s College, but primarily because it addresses directly the central question of this conference: the purpose of liberal education. From lecturing about these ideas on other campuses, I have, however, learned much that will shape this presentation.) I believe it is mistake to tout liberal education as an ideal, an archetype of education that is defined by specific content (whether by component disciplines, by its curriculum, or by a list of “essentials of cultural literacy”), by distinctive pedagogical methods or techniques, or by institutional type. All these have morphed through history in response to intellectual, social/cultural, and technological changes. To elevate some particular iteration of liberal education as the Platonic ideal is to misunderstand and misdirect both our philosophical and our educational tasks. �2 Rather, liberal education should be understood as a tradition of educational theory and practice—not in the sense of a hoary set of inherited rituals that we must preserve, but as a vital and still-evolving tradition. What distinguishes this tradition from others is its supreme aim: the purpose of liberal education is the development a compelling conception of a flourishing life and the cultivation of such a life. “Flourishing” has both subjective and objective markers. I would identify the subjective markers as a general satisfaction with one’s life as it is and an identification with that life; the objective markers are the possession of the capacities and goods that conduce to and extend the subjective markers. “Flourishing” requires the ability to function with excellence and efficiency in the world. This is a eudaimonistic account developed within the Aristotelian tradition, but I do not wish to carry all of Aristotle’s intellectual baggage. Critics might claim that I am smuggling in the notion of “the good life”—an aristocratic, hegemonic, sexist, and racist view of what life is best; a prescriptive vision that arrogantly assumes the moral and intellectual authority of educators and the righteousness of their efforts. I reject these misunderstandings of my meaning. I do not mean that developing a conception of a flourishing life requires the apprehension of a pre-existing ideal; nor do I imply that there is a single, universal vision of such a life. This goal is an individual achievement, though it affects and is influenced by others, and the result is a diversity of visions. Moreover, the hard-won understanding of flourishing one achieves will likely evolve with life’s passages and later learning—it continues as an infinite task. It �3 is another deeply misconception to assume that the quest for a flourishing life, the well-springs of liberal education, arise only in situations of elite privilege and comfort. Concern for one’s life and its prospects may arise in reflective solitude, amidst crippling poverty, in despair, when resplendent ideals of the good life have been shattered, even after great horror. On the other hand, I do accept the Aristotelian claim that a flourishing life implies sources, supports, arenas, and engagement that are communal. And, as he noted, there is no guarantee that learning to flourish will guarantee a flourishing life; success is contingent on luck and other factors beyond human control. Nonetheless, adopting such an aim governs many aspects of our experience and in so doing shapes our life and identity. Taking seriously the hope of a flourishing life leads immediately to questions about the components of and effective ways to prepare for and cultivate such a life. Grappling with these large questions leads to others: What is the human condition? What are our prospects? Who am I and who might I become? What is my relationship to others and what may I learn from their experience? What can I do in the world? Understanding how we might flourish requires knowledge of what is, what might be, and what ought to be. Navigating this network of profound queries from different vantage points, theorists of liberal education developed what I will call paradigms. These comprehensive visions set polarities in the philosophy of education, establish subsidiary aims, generate forms of educational discourse, inspire curricula, and guide pedagogy. �4 There are, or so I have dscerned, five historical paradigms of liberal education. They are not ordered in revolutionary succession like Kuhnian paradigms; rather they are co-present, competing, and sometimes conflicting. Each paradigm privileges certain intellectual skills and virtues; each proffers a distinctive form of liberation and vision of the educated person; each has its own liabilities. Much of the dynamism of the tradition of liberal education is produced by their shifting dominance and blend. They are all in play today, and most institutions claim to adopt all of them in some distinctive balance. Though they present quite distinct visions of liberal education, I will argue that they ultimately require each other. Here are the five paradigms: Liberal education is for:  the transmission of culture—for the absorption of the human experience as encoded in “texts”;  self-actualization—for the identification, actualization, or creation of a normative self;  understanding the world—for comprehending the facts and forces that shape our lives;  engagement with the world—for active, normative, and effective engagement with the world; and  acquisition of the skills of learning and the disposition to use them. �5 After a brief characterization of each, I will turn to their relationships, and conclude by consideration how this analysis clarifies our task as educators. The Transmission of Culture Culture is not transmitted genetically; it can be preserved across generations only through learning. Both cultural content and its transmission were greatly enhanced by the creation of texts, durable objects that encode human experience. This paradigm harbors the wisdom that absorbing this precious legacy is the best path to a flourishing life, perhaps even a constitutive component of it. More passive interpretations of the paradigm focus on the student’s acquisition of this heritage, and therefore privilege skills of comprehension: reading (and intelligent listening and viewing); attention to detail; proficiency in languages; and the skills of explication. More active versions add the need to comment, analyze, critique, and evaluate—even to join the intertextual conversation and contribute texts in one’s own voice—and they privilege the additional requisite skills. Human finitude necessitates some principle of selection: it is not possible to assimilate all texts. Whether one rejects the label of “great works” or not, criteria of “worthiness” under some interpretation must be applied in creating a curriculum. This is the paradigm that undergirds Whewell’s “permanent studies,” Hutchins’ “Great Books,” Adler’s “Great Ideas,” and Oakeshott’s “Immortal Conversation.”— and the vision of St. John’s College. It portrays the liberally educated person as one �6 who is culturally literate, who knows masterworks and a body of literature, who has facility in multiple languages (symbol systems)—who is, in short, a scholar. This sort of study, its advocates claim, furnishes the mind; its pursuit enlivens the intellect and expands the moral imagination; it is the best strategy for a flourishing life. It offers the student liberation: liberation from a timeless, meaningless, unconstructed present; from parochial prejudice and narrowness of vision; from a solipsistic life. Self-actualization Under this paradigm, liberal education is about the awakening and nurturance of latent capacities and qualities with each student that conduce to a normative self. It is a form of perfectionism. It exhibits subtle variations that intimate metaphysical differences in the conception of the self: its aim may be conceived variously as finding or discovering oneself, as self-definition, self-realization, self-actualization, self-formation, or even self-creation. It all begins, of course, with knowing thyself. What does one get from a liberal education? One gets one’s self, transformed. As Pindar once wrote, “Become who you are.” Thus, liberal learning shapes identity. Self-actualization offers us liberation from confused and imposed identities, from alienation and inauthenticity, from the disappointment of stifled, untested, or suppressed potential. In a flourishing life, one shapes and achieves one’s ownmost possibilities. �7 The curriculum, for this paradigm, is derived not from a canon of treasured works, but from the potential and promise of one’s students. In its most elaborated form, the self and its potential are individuated; in simpler (and more practicable) forms, some more generic notion of the self, of human potential, predominates. It is, nonetheless, a view that recognizes, even celebrates, difference and diversity; the desired educational outcomes are suitably particular. It privileges reflection, selfawareness, and the willingness to go beyond one’s current comfort zone. What may seem to be self-absorption likely gives way as liberal education reveals the social, communal dimensions of self-actualization, of dependence on others—and their selfactualization—for a flourishing life. An educated person is, therefore, one who is accomplished and authentic, continually engaged in explorations of self-development. This is the paradigm of Froebel and Montessori, of institutions like Summerhill and colleges like Bennington, Hampshire, and Evergreen. Understanding the World The focus moves now from the inner life to the outer world: liberal education is aimed at gaining understanding the world in which we live and the forces that shape our lives. It urges us to grasp the world as it is, on its own terms, and not as a projection of our fears and needs; this is a task that has what philosophers call a “mind-to-world direction of fit.” We cannot attempt to create a flourishing life if we are ignorant of how the world works, of the natural and social forces that affect our �8 lives. From our own bodies to the operations of influential institutions, we face the things of this world with wonder, curiosity, care in observation, respect for evidence, perceptivity in theorizing and knowledge-construction—these are among the virtues and skills this paradigm privileges. Success requires far more than the acquisition of facts; we must learn methods of inquiry and acquire cognitive frameworks—and multiples of these are far better than one. The paradigm thus suggests a curriculum that features a breadth of disciplines and seeks integration. The liberation offered here is from superstition, ignorance, and error; and such understanding can have an emotional impact as well, freeing us from reflexive fear and hostility. The vision of the educated person, now idealized as a polymath, is a person with a supple intellect, with broad interest in and knowledge of the ways of the world, the disciplines, and with currency in the natural and social sciences. Engagement with the World The fourth paradigm construes liberal education as a preparation for engagement with and action in the world. (Historically, “the world” has meant the public domain, not often the domestic.) The aim is personal effectiveness—and so it idealizes the educated person as one a committed agent, one who can act effectively and ethically to persuade others, to serve and advance worthy causes—to change the world or to labor in that hope. Civic engagement, social reform, political activism, public service, cultural critique—these and more are activities that are anticipated or �9 often embodied in the educational program. Curricular content devolves from a knowledge and critique of the state of the world in light of one’s values, along with the requisite capacities for personal effectiveness. To become liberally educated is to be liberated from powerlessness, false constraints, and social entropy; from helpless by-standing; to gain freedom of agency, the capacity to shape one’s will to the fulfillment of one’s best judgment, to take a stand and act on behalf of one’s values. This paradigm is exemplified in Isocrates’ school, but also in Antioch College and in the motto of “Princeton in the nation’s service.” Acquiring the Skills of Learning This last paradigm emphasizes the “arts” of “liberal arts” (the artes of artes liberalis; the technai of technai eleutheriai). Here there is less concern with content, more with acquisition of the transferable skills that are useful in learning anything. An educated person is one who has learned how to learn and who has the disposition to use relevant skills in learning throughout a lifetime. Of course, the relevant skills change with technology, but in today’s world we are likely to focus on reading comprehension, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, information literacy, critical thinking, communication and social skills, and related skills. �10 What motivates this paradigm is the recognition that the world is constantly changing, knowledge evolves, memory fades, and we cannot carry the knowledge from the past confidently into the future. We can, however, respond by equipping ourselves with the skills to learn whatever might be salient to a flourishing life. Acquisition of these skills holds out the promise of liberation from becoming outmoded, from cognitive entropy, and the ignorance and uselessness that may follow. The student gains the freedom of self-directed learning. I hope I have conveyed these paradigms as quite distinct, but comprehensive and coherent, visions of liberal education, differing in the skills and virtues they elevate, the locus of the curriculum, their ideals of the educated person, and the form of liberation they offer. Each is attractive, even compelling, but “thin”; they require instantiation, so they each can be a fertile matrix to spawn curricula, to influence pedagogy, even to shape institutions. Many familiar educational controversies arise out of their competition, but conflicts may also arise within a paradigm—for example, disputes over the contents of the canon in the Transmission of Culture paradigm, or disputes about the comparative value of different disciplines in the Understanding the World paradigm. As I said, the tradition of liberal education displays many iterations of theory and practice that reflect their competition, their shifting prominence, and the relationships drawn among them. �11 But they are not simply competitors. Ultimately, they seek the same end. It is perhaps easy to forget that these paradigms arise from the same supreme purpose: the development of a conception of a flourishing life and the cultivation of such a life. And they are intertwined: a vigorous champion of the assimilation of culture through an agonistic encounter with great texts might conclude (as Oakeshott did) by asserting that such study is the pathway to self-actualization. Similarly, an advocate of the skills of learning model may ultimate justify their position by the need for such skills in engaging the world. Beyond this, however, they seem to require each other: the questions each asks leads to the questions of others. How could one engage with the world without understanding it? How could one assimilate great works without the skills of learning? The distinctive liabilities and dangers that each paradigm carries are ameliorated by the strengths of others. For example, the temptation to selfabsorption of the self-actualization paradigm is corrected by the outward and more objective requirements of explicating the texts of others, or of understanding or engaging with the world. The hypnotism of the past that is perhaps a liability of a life devoted to masterworks is countered by the future orientation that undergirds efforts to engage, change, or reform the world. And so on. Most institutions today seem to claim a blend of most if not all these five paradigms; even those that elevate one usually imply that their signature paradigm is a gateway to the benefits of the others. �12 Finally, I want to claim that this account entails that liberal education is a deeply moral enterprise. First, the process of liberal education must meet ethical criteria, such as avoiding indoctrination and valuing the student’s integrity. Second, the supreme aim—a flourishing life—incorporates moral virtues and values. A flourishing life is, however, larger in scope than a moral life; it incorporates more than moral virtues and values. And finally, it is indirectly moral in that success in its subsidiary aims is relevant to, often essential for, moral activity. Expanding the moral imagination, knowing how the world works, seeing the larger picture and broader implications, developing one’s capacities and knowing how to learn, and having the skills of worldly engagement—surely these are components of moral education and enlightened moral agency. An emphasis on objectives and outcomes is meaningful only when our activities remain tethered to our aim. But this brings us to our educational task: each of us—each institution, each academic department, each faculty—carries the responsibility of regularly reinterpreting our vision of liberal education, of continuing the evolution and vitality of the tradition. What is educational quality, what serves the living of a flourishing life today? Each paradigm comprehends a plethora of further specification. Our work is to craft a blended version of these paradigms that suits our our intellectual, social, and technological context. This task itself reflects—and may embody—the process of crafting and cultivating a flourishing life. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 12 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Learning to flourish : a philosophical exploration of liberal education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Daniel DeNicola at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource DeNicola, Daniel R. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004526 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c694b264759a06cb579e94f61dbba204.pdf c94a2c7e51238404cb2b3130cab87ad1 PDF Text Text Liberal Education and Exemplary Ordinariness: On the Meaning of Bildung in Hegel’s Political Philosophy Andrew J. Bove—Villanova University For Presentation at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, October 18th, 2014 My aim in this paper is to understand how Hegel thinks classical education or study of the ancients participates in the transition or transformation of bourgeois society into the state, a transition that is perhaps the most distinctive moment and feature of Hegel’s political thought as a whole. According to Hegel, what makes a society of individuals into a genuine community is a process of formation through which the abstract notion of individual rights becomes embodied in the workings of the state and the hearts and minds of its citizens or members. He also claims, in a lecture written about a decade before he elaborated his formal political philosophy or philosophy of right, that the study of great literary works of antiquity—and of the ancient Greeks especially—plays a crucial part in the transformative process he describes. To what does Hegel ascribe the constitutional power of such study? Is the classical education he describes truly a liberal education? And what can we learn from him about the role of liberal education in strengthening or deepening the foundations of our own community? I aim to shed some light on these questions. The first part of the paper is a consideration of the education or Bildung of bourgeois society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft ] into or towards the state [Staat] that Hegel describes in the Philosophy of Right. In the second part of the paper I will examine a few striking figures and images in the lecture, with the intent of understanding Hegel’s conception of the worth of classical education in the modern world and, in particular, a fundamentally liberal world of individuals pursuing their separate ends and their own notions of happiness. 1 �I: The Bildung of Society: A Consideration of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§182-7 Hegel conceives of the modern political association as a restless, dynamic, unruly, but ultimately rational process through which a collection of individuals—aware of their rights or what Hegel calls “subjective freedom”—strive and struggle, one and all, to attain their own ends and end up constituting a new kind of ethical unity that Hegel calls the state.1 From the standpoint of the political philosopher, it is a kind of dramatic spectacle through which a new form of human community comes into being behind the backs of its members as they aim only to satisfy their private interests. Hegel looks out, Zeus-like, upon the battlefield of bürgerliche Gesellschaft and appreciates the combatants not for their heroism or warrior virtue, but rather (and somewhat ironically) for their unwitting advancement of the universal interest. What he sees with much greater clarity than the participants do is the absolute extent to which they need one another in order to realize their individual ends. He sees them becoming more and more alike and cooperative even as they think exclusively of their own purposes and projects. A passage from a Zusatz2 to the opening paragraph of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft section captures Hegel’s understanding especially well: 1 State [Staat] for Hegel has a special meaning as the ethical community in which individuals or “private persons” find themselves finally “at home.” It is, for him, something morally much greater than a juridical entity that protects individual rights. The latter sense (as will be discussed below) entails a relationship of estrangement between the individual’s purposes and desires and the means to their accomplishment and satisfaction. The genuine state only comes into being as a result of an accomplished process of overcoming that estrangement and, more broadly, the process through which individual subjectivity places its stamp on the world. In his introductory lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel famously claims that “the state is not a work of art”—that is, it does not come into being directly and intentionally through human planning and artifice, but only as the final expression of human will and action and the historical world they create. 2 The Zusätze or additions to the text of the Philosophie des Rechts are based on the notes of two of Hegel’s students who attended different series of the lectures that form the basis of work. The—necessarily selective, given their volume—inclusion of these notes in later editions of the work is controversial, but the notes themselves are reliable and I do not hesitate to make reference to them where they are helpful in making sense of Hegel’s argument. The Zusätze should not be confused with Hegel’s own Anmerkungen or remarks to many of the paragraphs in the work, the purpose of which is to unpack and elaborate on, or give broader context to, the work’s very dense and abstract main text. On these matters see H.B. Nisbet’s Translator’s Preface to the Cambridge edition of the work: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Allen Wood, ed. (Cambridge, 1991), pp. xxxv-xxxvi. I make use of the Wood-Nisbet edition throughout the paper with some modifications to the translation. 2 �Since particularity is tied to the condition of universality, the whole [of bourgeois society] is the ground [Boden] of mediation in which all individual characteristics [Einzelheiten], all aptitudes, and all accidents of birth and fortune are liberated, and where the waves of passion surge forth, governed only by the reason which shines through them. Particularity, limited by universality, is the only standard by which each particular [person] promotes his welfare.3 Hegel seems quietly to delight in the vision of an anarchic mass of liberated individuals getting straightened out as a consequence of the passionate pursuit of their own ends. They are, in a sense, defeated by their own rationality, and there is a certain charm in the beholding of this spectacle. While the individuals regard the state as merely a juridical structure that allows them to pursue their private interests, Hegel sees this whole situation as a kind of spiritual engine that generates a substantial moral community: the state in the proper sense of the term.4 The individual regards the state as the means to his own projects and satisfaction; it allows him to get what he wants and to keep it (or to do what he wants and keep doing it) without fear of invasion or violence at the hands of the others.5 But Hegel sees society as the means to or presupposition of the state—the ethical communion that comes into being only as a result of the formative process that takes place in society. His political-philosophical aim is to show how the selfdefeating structure of society leads to higher possibilities for individual satisfaction. The spirited modern individual must constantly sacrifice his particularity at the altar of the universal—the “system of all-round interdependence (§183)” in which he involves himself willy-nilly—and 3 Addition to §182. See Hegel’s rather grandiloquent (yet also quite technical) definition in Philosophie des Rechts, §257: “The state is the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of the ethical idea—the ethical spirit as the substantial will, manifest [offenbar] and clear to itself, which thinks and knows itself and implements what it knows in so far as it knows it.” 5 For Hegel, Thomas Hobbes is the philosopher of society in Hegel’s sense, not of the state. The Leviathan, despite its great power and fearsomeness, guarantees only the unstable flux of society and the sense of estrangement that accompanies it. Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Hegel’s sense is not the Hobbesian state of nature, but rather its opposite, what Hobbes calls civil society or the civil condition of mankind. 4 3 �Hegel undertakes to show how this (unintentional) sacrifice does finally bring back the gods of the city. Thus far, Hegel’s theory of modern society does not appear to differ fundamentally from the theories of many of his eighteenth-century political-philosophical predecessors. Kant, for instance, famously describes how the very antagonism of society awakens previously dormant moral powers whose activation begins the historical process of a moral regeneration of mankind.6 Both Kant and Hegel owe a lot to the works of the Scottish political thinkers—above all, Adam Smith—and their innovative accounts of how commerce and intercourse amongst essentially self-concerned human beings leads to new forms of human association and interconnectedness. In attempting to explain what is distinctive about the Hegelian understanding, I would begin with the suggestion that both Kant and Hegel are responding to Smith’s type of social and psychological analysis, but in the spirit of a radical re-founding of the modern community that they learned from reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They read Smith in the light of Rousseau and the possibility of a restoration of a genuine republic to which he aspires. One might say that Kant and Hegel are attempting a synthesis of two thinkers who take divergent approaches to the problem of how a genuine community of interests can be constituted on the basis of individual rights or “subjective freedom.” If Smith’s view is broadly that the antagonism of society produces distinct manners and sentiments and a sort of psychic or moral economy that (together with a flourishing physical economy) compensates us for the loss of genuine republican association; and if Rousseau’s view is broadly that the antagonism must be radically superseded by means of the establishment of a general will that founds a new republic—then the view of 6 See especially the essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in which Kant describes how “a pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole.” In Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 41-53. 4 �Kant and Hegel is that the social antagonism itself contains the intellectual and moral seeds of its own regeneration. It can reasonably aim at something much higher than a thoroughly “polite” and economically productive civilization, yet without repudiating the fundamentally individualistic character of modern society. It is not, however, that Kant and Hegel are attempting to broker a compromise between two thinkers who have radically different dispositions towards modern life, but rather that they claim to have arrived at a truer and more complete understanding of the nature and consequences of individual freedom. One might say that in their view, Smith articulates the process without articulating the final result; while Rousseau articulates the result without fully accounting for the process.7 Kant and Hegel both approach the problem as one of forming or educating individual freedom or subjectivity in a profoundly transformative way, but without abandoning the foundation of individual rights. On the contrary: they aim to complete the structure to which that very foundation gives rise. The Kantian solution—an ambitious attempt to engender a progressive project that gives new moral meaning to human history—is of great interest and difficulty in its own right and I will not attempt any kind of summary here. (And Kant, too, draws on classical notions of liberal education in his understanding of how individual freedom can fully realize its own moral possibilities.) For the remainder of this section, I will attempt to draw out what is distinctive and interesting about Hegel’s understanding of the “education” of individual freedom that characterizes bourgeois society. Hegel spells out his basic claim most fully and clearly in §187 of the Philosophie des Rechts. Individuals, he claims, “can attain their end only insofar as they themselves determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a universal way, and make themselves into links in the 7 These formulations are admittedly glib and are not intended as anything remotely close to an accurate characterization of these two great modern political philosophers. My intent is simply to characterize a certain broad way of thinking about modern society that is common to both Kant and Hegel. 5 �chain of this interconnection [Zusammenhang]”—i.e., the universal element of society which appears to individuals merely as a means to their private ends and not as an end-in-itself. “The interest of the idea in all of this,” he continues, which is not present in the consciousness of these members of bourgeois society as such, is the process of raising [erheben], through natural necessity as well as their arbitrary needs, the members’ individuality and naturalness towards [zur] formal freedom and formal universality of knowing and willing—of educating [bilden] subjectivity in its particularity [besonderheit]. Active participation in the “system of needs” that characterizes bourgeois society leads to an elevation of individual judgment and action to the level of formal freedom and universality of moral and intellectual judgment. The more we pursue our private ends, the more we get to know our way around the “chain” of interdependency, and this has the effect of making us something more than mere links in this chain. We become in a more normative sense social beings, aware of the general context of our actions. And Hegel characterizes all this as a process of education or cultivation—Bildung—“of subjectivity in its particularity.”8 This key paragraph occasions a relatively lengthy Anmerkung on education in general, in which Hegel makes clear that the education or cultivation of members of bourgeois society is not an education merely by analogy, or an education only in the special sense of what might today be called “socialization.” He readily associates Bildung—a word with very lofty, including religious, connotations9—with the very ordinary and prosaic process of learning how to be a 8 The key part of the sentence reads: “…die Subjektivität in ihrer Besonderheit zu bilden.” The dative construction makes it clear that subjectivity is being educated or cultivated in (not into) its condition of particularity. The sense is similar to something like, “He learned, in his naïvete, that not everyone who makes a promise is to be trusted.” Hegel means to say that subjectivity is, in truth, being formed out of or away from its particularity, towards universality of thinking and acting. 9 The word has its origins in the word Bild—picture or image or eikon—and in particular, Martin Luther’s use of the word in his translation of Genesis 1.26-27: “Und Gott sprach: Lasset uns Menschen machen, ein Bild, das uns gleich sei…. Und Gott schuf den Menschen ihm zum Bilde, zum Bilde Gottes schuf er ihn.” (“And God said, Let us make 6 �functioning member of modern bourgeois society. The commentary is all the more remarkable in that in it, Hegel is refuting two alternative views of the worth and significance of education, and his refutation seems to proceed precisely from that lofty sense of Bildung in comparison with which Hegel’s use of the term sounds such a dissonant note. Specifically, he rejects both the Rousseauean understanding of education or culture as the corruption of natural simplicity, and the moral flipside of that understanding according to which education is nothing but a means to the ends of “needs, their satisfaction, the pleasures and comforts of particular life, etc.” Both views, he states, “show a lack of acquaintance with the nature of spirit and the goal of reason.” Hegel’s intention here seems to be to show that Bildung, in its true and proper meaning, is not something external to, or separate from, the process through which the individual discovers himself to be a member of a larger social context—but that it is that very process, grasped in its full human significance. What, then, is the “goal of reason,” if it is neither natural simplicity nor the satisfaction of individual needs and desires? Hegel states it as follows: [its goal is] for natural simplicity [Natureinfalt]—whether as passive selflessness or as the coarseness [Rohheit] of knowing and willing—that is, the immediacy and individuality in which the spirit is immersed, to be worked away [weggearbeitet] and for its externality to receive for the first time the rationality of which it is capable, namely, the form of universality, that is, understanding [Verständigkeit]. Hegel seems to equate the acquisition of rationality or understanding with the elimination of natural coarseness. Hence Bildung is simultaneously something positive and something negative, the development of new powers and the “working away” of original nature. On both man after our image, after our likeness…. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”) Bildung literally means the formation of man in the image of God, and its later humanistic use retains (or retained until relatively recently) much of the majesty of its origins. “Culture” in the sense of “man of culture” captures some, but by no means all, of Bildung’s sense of a deep inner formation and perfection of mind and soul. 7 �the individual and the general level, it involves an exchange or replacement of the immediate and particular with the mediated and universal. As in the art of sculpture, the rough exterior of the stone needs to be worked away to reveal the universal form that lies within, but which is, in truth, a result of the very process of the working away of the “natural” exterior. It is only by means of such a process that spirit finds itself “at home” in externality. To remain on the level of satisfying immediate needs and wants is to remain in a condition of self-estrangement—to be compelled to venture out into a foreign land merely to subsist. “Education [Bildung],” Hegel concludes, is therefore liberation and work towards a higher liberation; it is the absolute transition [Durchgangspunkt] to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life [Sittlichkeit], which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality. In practice, education is “hard work [harte Arbeit] against mere subjectivity of conduct, against the immediacy of desire, and likewise against the subjective vanity of feeling and the whim of one’s preferences.” This negative labor of opposition is, at the same time, an ascent to the level of understanding and the being-at-home-in-externality that is, for Hegel, the condition of genuine individuality. The shucking off of natural simplicity and roughness allows us recognize ourselves in external actuality and, thus, to possess ourselves fully. We are liberated from the compulsion of having constantly to “play the game” to satisfy our needs and desires; the barrier between our subjective particularity and the interplay of individual interests is effaced or eliminated through our very participation in that interplay. In a famous (or infamous) Zusatz to the foregoing passage, Hegel comments as follows: “By educated people, we may understand in the first place those who do everything as others do it and who do not flaunt their particularity, whereas it is precisely the latter that the uneducated 8 �display, since their conduct is not guided by the universal aspects of the object.” He goes so far as to claim that education “irons out” our peculiarities—like wrinkles from a shirt.10 Again, Hegel seems to go out of his way to show that Bildung is not some kind of special possession, but an exemplary kind of ordinariness—the exemplariness of neither wanting nor needing to be anything special. Hegel appears as a great defender and champion of the bourgeois at a time when the bourgeois was already an object of contempt and of all manner of political and aesthetic attacks and efforts of overcoming. The fully self-conscious participant in bourgeois society, the man who has embraced the game and made it his own, is, Hegel suggests, nothing less than the complete human being. One might say that he means to vindicate civilization against culture, the alleged antagonism between which is expressive of an approach to the problem of modern dividedness that Hegel fundamentally rejects. For Hegel, “culture” means precisely the Bildung (or Ausbildung—the working out or elaboration) of civilization’s implicit rationality and completeness. “Culture” is not a radical alternative to civilization, but a civilization that has come to understand its own finality and has thus made peace with itself. For Hegel, the “man of culture” is the bourgeois who has grasped that his is the most rational, satisfying, and contradiction-free life that can be lived on the foundation of individual freedom. Hegel implies that even in a self-consciously individualistic society, one should expect a certain human type to predominate, and that this (in the strict sense) assimilative tendency of individual-rights based societies ought to be encouraged and seen through to its best conclusion, rather than fought against in the name of human variety or diversity (as the Romantics of Hegel’s 10 This much-decried passage might be seen as simply an affirmation of the essentially classical, as opposed to Romantic or naturalistic, character of education in general. Swimming provides a useful analogy: If one wants to swim well in the “ocean” of externality—the sea of competing individuals with competing interests into which we are thrown—then it is best to master the accepted strokes and eliminate individual peculiarities of motion. Excellent swimmers all look about the same in the pool, and to see them all at once, moving together and in competition with each other, is an impressive spectacle indeed. 9 �time and, perhaps, the “multiculturalists” of ours). Indeed, it is especially in such a society that human beings tend to be or to become similar to one another, to a greater degree than in any past society. All are gebildet—formed, shaped, educated, cultivated—by and into the one universal Zusammenhang. There are no substantial social classes through which our characters are shaped, and traditional morality or natural law in a pre-modern sense is too weak to prevail over the spirit of individual freedom that animates modern societies. Moral traditions or Sitten must necessarily be reconstituted through the free actions of individuals. In this sense, modern societies, our own included, are the least “diverse” that have ever existed. Our incessant talk of “diversity” is ultimately an expression of our lack of diversity. We feel, obscurely perhaps, this lack, and we are troubled by it; but according to Hegel’s account, this is not because we truly love or long for human diversity (it is difficult to conceive how such an abstraction could be an object of human longing), but because we have not thought through and cultivated our uniformity and responded to the intellectual and moral demands that it places on us. We have a bad conscience about out failure to accept what we are, and we try to appease it by praising and exaggerating superficial differences. But this only leads to a bad kind of similarity or sameness—a generic sort of eccentricity that is, for Hegel, a sort of no-man’s-land of the spirit.11 II: Liberal Education in a Bourgeois World Does classical liberal education have any place in the bourgeois world that Hegel champions? Surprisingly, study of the ancients appears to play an essential role in the larger process of Bildung that he seems to conceive in thoroughly modern terms. What, then, is the relationship 11 Many things in our own society might be seen as examples of this tendency: “customized” consumer products that are nothing more than inputs into a computerized manufacturing system; the prevalence of tattoos and body art expressing outward difference but inner sameness; the nearly infinite variety of poetically-named colors with which to paint “accent walls”; “hipster culture” and its tendency to become entangled in ironic self-contradiction; etc. 10 �between classical learning and the Bildung of bourgeois society? What purpose does the former serve, if not to help us to ascend out of the noisy cave of modern society? How does study of the ancient Greeks and Romans belong to or participate in the process through which individuals form themselves into an ethical whole on the foundation of subjective freedom? I will address these questions by examining some key passages in the first of a series of annual addresses Hegel gave as rector of the new gymnasium established at Nuremburg in 1809. The lecture as a whole takes the form of a defense of classical learning—a defense which was by no means either expected or obligatory on Hegel’s part. Hegel wants to set the tone for the new institution, and he does so by making the case for a revival of classical education against some of the major currents of his age. “The spirit and purpose of our institution,” Hegel claims in beginning his statement about the principle [Prinzip] and fundamentals [Grundzüge] of the new school, “is preparation for learned study, a preparation which is built on the foundation [Grund] of the Greeks and Romans.”12 Their works have been, for millennia (Hegel rather oddly says), the ground or soil [Boden] “on which all culture [Kultur]13 has stood, from which it has sprung, and with which it has been in continuous connection [Zusammenhang].” It is impossible, he claims, to conceive of 12 “Rede zum Schuljahrabschluß am 29. September 1809,” in G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 4: Nürnberger und Heidelberger Schriften, 1808-1817 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 314. Part of the address is translated by Richard Kroner as “On Classical Studies,” in Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern, 2000), pp. 291-9. I have made use of Kroner’s translation with some modifications. 13 Hegel uses the word Kultur occasionally (including twice in significant passages in this lecture) as more or less a synonym for Bildung, which has a much more important and definite (but also quite complicated and puzzling) place in his philosophy as a whole. Kultur for Hegel seems to mean a society or a people in a gebildete condition. In the second passage (discussed below), Hegel speaks of “the culture [Kultur], art, and science of a people” in a way that implies its equivalence to “the Bildung of the modern world.” The implication is that Bildung includes all three of these entities, so perhaps Kultur may be taken to refer more specifically to manners or moral culture, which would be roughly consistent with the Kantian usage of the word. (Kant makes systematic use of Kultur on account of his neo-Roman emphasis on the careful tending and cultivation of nature.) The later nineteenth-century German tendency to employ Kultur as a polemical term against—and as the antidote to—civilization or civilisation as something typically English or French is foreign to Hegel, who, as I explain above, can be understood to be an opponent of the civilization-culture distinction before it really gets political traction. 11 �an educated or enlightened society that does not somehow rest on the foundation of the ancients. Hegel then ventures the following analogy: Just as the natural organisms, plants and animals, struggle to free themselves from gravitation, but cannot escape this element of their being [Wesen], so has all art and science grown up out of that ground [Boden]. And even though the arts and sciences have attained their own self-sufficiency, they have not emancipated themselves from the recollection [Erinnerung] of that older education [Bildung]. As Antaeus renewed his forces by touching his mother earth, so has every new resurgence and invigoration of science and culture [Bildung] raised itself to the sunlight out of a return to antiquity [Altertum]. Several things are noteworthy in this complicated image. First, modern knowledge is rooted in ancient soil; it is a new growth, but it is not a radical departure from or superseding of the ancients. Second, the works of the ancients appear in the analogy as something different in kind from modern art and science. Hegel likens ancient Bildung to the soil, the inorganic element, and modern Bildung to the organic beings, plants and animals. Modern Bildung lives and dies and regenerates itself, while ancient Bildung is the permanent ground or Boden of all spiritual growth and striving. Ancient Bildung is original, modern Bildung is derivative. Third, modern Bildung, by its nature, does indeed wish to escape its ground, but is prevented from doing so by an external force, recollection, just as natural beings are prevented by gravitation from taking leave of the earth. Finally, the allusion to Antaeus implies that modern Bildung would destroy itself (or be destroyed by some Heracles) if ever it did succeed in escaping or renouncing ancient Bildung. This account of modern intellectual and artistic activity is reminiscent of Hegel’s account of the activity of the modern individual in the Philosophie des Rechts discussed above. Modern knowledge wishes to be immediately for itself and independent even though it is grounded in the element of the ancients; just as the modern individual wishes to be immediately for himself even 12 �though he depends on the universal element of society for his subsistence. The logic of development by means of self-defeating self-assertion is the same in both cases. In the case of modern individuality, what prevents lift-off is the Zusammenhang of mutually interdependent individuals. The more we strive for independence, the more we find ourselves caught up in the universal element of society. In the case of modern knowledge, the more it strives for independence, the more it “recollects” the ancient ground from whence it is sprung. In both cases, the attempt to escape the origin leads back to the origin, but the relationship to the origin is profoundly altered in the process. The ancient republic is the ethical origin of the modern constitutional state populated by an enlightened, sociable, prosperous, and mutually cooperative bourgeoisie. Similarly, ancient Bildung is the ground on which the modern arts and sciences flourish and proliferate, and enable the manifold pursuits of the modern individual. The implication is that the study of the ancients is somehow essential to the maintenance of the integrity and self-conscious universality of the modern state. The study of—or rather the modern return to the ancients, which is what Hegel was trying to effect at the new gymnasium in the new, post-Napoleonic, reformed Bavarian monarchy14—has, for Hegel, the greatest political importance. This return is deeply implicated in the Durchgangspunkt, the moment of passing over into “the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life.” The process Hegel describes in the Philosophie des Rechts of simultaneously ridding ourselves of natural coarseness while 14 On the political background and context of Hegel’s appointment as rector, see the excellent account of Terry Pinkard in Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 7. Pinkard presents Hegel, along with his friend and patron Immanuel Niethammer, as a champion of “neo-humanism” against Catholic and Protestant traditionalism on the one hand, and modern utilitarianism on the other. While this is broadly accurate, it perhaps does not appreciate Hegel’s radical skepticism towards any kind of “cultural” palliative for modern society. Pinkard’s Hegel is an intellectual like Niethammer, but Hegel may be more accurately characterized as anti-intellectual in the strict sense of the word. Bildung, in Hegel’s view, is not primarily the formation of an enlightened class that can direct society, but rather it is the formation or education of society itself. There is a deeply republican character to Hegel’s thinking that is (ironically) often missed by interpreters who regard him as a theorist of society or community in the sense of a wise and public-spirited intellectual critic. 13 �acquiring new rational powers seems to be underwritten by a new regard for the works of the ancients as the permanent or inorganic basis, the soil, of modern ethical life. Later in the lecture, after defending the importance of the study of ancient languages as one moment in the organic whole of knowledge rather than (as it was in the old institution) the most important part of higher learning, Hegel raises an objection that prompts a stirring, and rather poetic, defense of classical education. Hegel points out that the study of ancient languages, even when their place in the whole of knowledge is properly understood, is very demanding and timeconsuming. Shouldn’t we then just leave it to a few specialists and allow the rest to devote their time to the study and cultivation of the new sciences? “It seems to be a just demand,” Hegel says, “that the culture [Kultur], art, and science of a people come to stand on its own two feet.” He then poses the following question: May we not believe, of the Bildung of the modern world, of our enlightenment and the progress of all the arts and sciences, that they have replaced their Greek and Roman children’s shoes and outgrown their leadingstrings [Gängelbande] so as to be able to walk on their own ground and soil [Grund und Boden]?15 Hegel alludes to Kant’s exhortation (in his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?”) that we cut our leading strings and start living and thinking by our own lights. But, he continues, if we truly wish to overcome coarseness or vulgarity—“if we agree that excellence [das Vortreffliche] should be the point of departure”—then, he claims, the study of Greek and Roman literature (in that order of priority) is the indispensable basis [Grundlage] of education. “The perfection and glory of these masterworks,” Hegel says, “must be the spiritual bath, the profane baptism, which gives to the soul its first and inalienable tone and coloration [Tinktur] for taste and knowledge [Wissenschaft].” Moreover, a general familiarity with the ancients does not suffice for this 15 Werke 4, p. 317. 14 �critical preparation of soul. Rather, “we must dwell and dine with them, so that we can inhale their air, their ideas, their manners, one might say even their errors and prejudices, and become at home in this world, the most beautiful that has ever existed.” What should one make of this striking image of a rigorous classical education—one that includes mastery of Greek and Latin—as a “profane baptism”? For one thing, it implies that classical education is, or ought to be, more a radical exposure to the ancients than a scientific study of their works or way of life. We return to the ancients not primarily to know or learn about our origins, but to transport ourselves out of the modern world and back into what Hegel calls “the second, higher paradise, the paradise of the human spirit.” There is a theological understanding at work, at least metaphorically,16 that needs to be unpacked before we can understand how the works of the ancients function as a permanent standard for education. For Hegel, the ancient world is the postlapsarian peak of human existence. It is the beautiful whole assembled from the broken shards of the first, naïve paradise of human nature—like a glorious mosaic made from the pieces of a simple glass vessel that has been smashed. Its blessedness or serenity [Heiterkeit] is no child’s game, but is like a veil, “spread over the melancholy which knows the cruelty [Härte] of fate but is not thereby driven to lose its freedom and moderation.” We have, Hegel implies, fallen from this second paradise that knew how to deal beautifully with a human condition filled with suffering and strife. (Hegel seems to have Homer and Greek tragedy especially in mind here.) The post-Christian principle “of the self-sufficient and inherently infinite personality of the individual, the principle of subjective freedom”17 disrupts 16 Hegel’s understanding of paradise is in a sense necessarily metaphorical, in that paradise for him is not truly paradise, but rather a beautiful condition that was made to be broken or ruined as the means to a higher or more developed condition. The “higher” paradise of the spirit occurs in the world after the fall (!), and its beauty is owing to its sublime and poetic way of dwelling in a world of suffering and sin. The true (earthly) paradise comes at the end. And it is not truly a paradise, but a world that understands itself as final or post-historical and in which the spirit can finally come to rest and experience boredom—with all of its problems and possibilities. 17 Philosophie des Rechts §185 (Anmerkung) 15 �the tragic beauty of the ancient world. Its disruption, however, is both lamentable and inevitable—inevitable, because according to Hegel’s redemptivist understanding, we can only return to God by means of the recognition of the individual’s infinite personality which is sacrificed in the world of the ancients for the sake of the beautiful whole. Yet our souls need to “bathe” in their world if we are going to have any hope of constituting a new whole through our own harte Arbeit following our expulsion from the first paradise. We need not just a glimpse of, but a thorough immersion in the greatness of their sentiments, their statuesque [plastische] virtue free from moral ambiguity, their patriotism [Vaterlandsliebe], the grand manner of their deeds and characters, the multiplicity of their destinies, of their morals and constitutions as a preparation for the demands of modern ethical life or citizenship. The new ethical whole that we modern individuals are trying to assemble will never be as beautiful as the ancient precisely because it will never be as “holistic”; it will always be riven by the spirited striving of individuals who are all too aware of the infiniteness of their personalities. Thus, “whoever has not known the works of the ancients, has lived without knowing what beauty is.” A synopsis of the foregoing argument might be that we need to study the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans because they are the expression of the only paradise that historical human beings have ever really known. But a claim like this can easily lend itself to snobbery, philistinism, “elitism,” and a host of other vices of the intellectual (or, the general vice of being an intellectual, or at least an intellectual of a certain kind). Is there something more definite that serious exposure to the ancients does, according to Hegel, that makes it something more than just a beholding of a beautiful world (a world whose beauty is hardly self-evident to many modern people, as anyone who teaches Homer and Aristotle to college freshmen can attest)? How, 16 �exactly, does classical education function as a baptism or purification of the modern soul that orients it towards a higher kind of cooperation amongst free individuals than would otherwise be possible? Hegel addresses the question indirectly towards the end of the lecture when he treats the formal aspect of education after having discussed its substance. By what formal means or process does the study of the ancients have the effects or consequences that he claims it does? His answer, in sum, is that these works, read in their original languages, have the effect of estranging [Entfremden] us from ourselves. Genuine Bildung takes place only by means of the imagination’s straining to occupy itself with “something not given in immediate experience, something foreign, something pertaining to recollection, to memory and the thinking mind.”18 Hegel claims that “only what is strange and foreign attracts our interest and lures us to activity and effort.” Our moral and intellectual faculties are quickened by the experience of the foreign—similar, perhaps, to how one becomes more attentive and perceptive when visiting a foreign country for the first time. Hegel speaks of the pedagogical necessity of a “separation wall” [Scheidewand], and claims that “the world and language of the ancients” is best suited to this purpose. Their world appears to us as a barrier between ourselves and…ourselves; that is, between the unformed self and the self that has realized itself through a process of self-estrangement and return.19 Not just any 18 Werke 4, pp. 320-1. Alasdair MacIntyre captures something of the spirit of Hegel’s claim in the following statement: “[I]t is a primary responsibility of a university to be unresponsive, to give its students what they need, not what they want, and to do so in such a way that what they want becomes what they need and what they choose is choice-worthy.” MacIntyre, “Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices,” in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. Robert E. Sullivan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 15. (Cited in Liam Kavanagh, “Interview: Alasdair MacIntyre,” Expositions 6.2 (2012), p. 1.) 19 The subtitle of the Bildung section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (published two years prior to the Nuremburg lecture discussed here) is “the self-estranged spirit” or “spirit in its self-estrangement.” It is the quasihistorical account of how spirit-in-general comes to be gebildet, that is, to return to itself in a new kingdom following the break-up of its ancient paradise. A complete investigation of the questions being posed in this paper 17 �unknown subject matter encourages this process. We require a genuinely foreign world that challenges us and draws us out of ourselves through its beauty as much as its troubling strangeness. The works of the ancients possess an unmatched power to separate us from ourselves and, hence, force us to work to rebuild ourselves into something greater. They are like a beautiful, exotic stranger whom we meet outside the gates of the first paradise, and who excites in us the energy of mind and soul to build for ourselves a new home worthy of the spirit with which we are originally endowed. Conclusion For Hegel, classical education serves the purpose of reminding us of human possibilities that our world of individualistic striving tends to obscure. It draw us out of ourselves towards what is universal, and encourages the best tendencies of our type of society towards genuinely ethical cooperation. It does not, however, promise any sort of transcendence of, or ascent above, the plane of bourgeois society. Although he waxes eloquent about the study of the ancients as immersion in the truly beautiful, he comes close to conceiving of classical education as essentially the means, or an especially important part of the means, of society’s self-actualization or self-completion. It is the final stage of the modern individual’s moral work of smoothing off his rough edges and becoming an exemplary participant in bourgeois society—the type who works hard, cares about the common good while respecting others’ freedom and independence, and assiduously works to “bring people together” instead of remaining absorbed in his own private affairs. would require considerable attention to the Phenomenology, which is Hegel’s complete account of the process of spirit’s “recollection” of all its past phases that brings its historical development to completion. 18 �Is Bildung as Hegel conceives it a liberal education? In the sense that it aims to liberate us from the narrow moral horizons that modern individuality tends to encourage, then it can certainly be called liberal. And Hegel intimates another sense of the liberating power of classical education when he speaks of its power to excite in the young the desire to dwell in a foreign world and allow themselves to be transformed by the experience. But he conceives of this power in terms of an immanent social process through which the modern individual learns to recognize himself in the workings of bourgeois society. Its purpose is ultimately to make us more completely at home in bourgeois society rather than to free us in a radical way from its forces and relations (whatever such a liberation might mean or entail). Hegel’s most basic thought is that the truly liberally educated human being is the one who embodies a sort of exemplary ordinariness and derives satisfaction and serenity from being this way. He has, with the help of the ancients, learned to “own” his bourgeois existence and not to long for any kind of transcendence, at least not in this world. We may wonder at the spectacle of such a person. Whether one wonders with admiration depends, finally, on whether one thinks there are other modern possibilities for a human life well and fully lived. 19 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. 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Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and exemplary ordinariness : on the meaning of Bildung in Hegel's political philosophy Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Andrew Bove at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bove, Andrew J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004523 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e2c3cad1d2acb56339e8d81ff65f8e90.pdf 8e6ff50fd31b3c0deb9821aac9c39574 PDF Text Text Liberal Education and STEM Education St. John’s College 50th Anniversary Conference Presentation Michael J. Bolin, Wyoming Catholic College September 15, 2014 Abstract: One of the single biggest obstacles to the proliferation of liberal education is the modern tendency to consider STEM fields as the most or only important fields of study. I argue, to the contrary, that the beneficial cultural effects of progress in the natural sciences and related fields depend in part on a foundation of liberal learning both in scientists themselves and in the broader populace. In a post-Baconian scientific world, scientific progress has both a technological/practical aspect and a philosophical/theoretical aspect. Success with regard to the first aspect is necessarily defined in terms of one's conception of human flourishing, the philosophical debate over which is behind disputes over, e.g., energy, nuclear, and agricultural policy. Interpretations of the second aspect inevitably influence the first, as is seen in the tendency of physicists to extrapolate from their scientific research to broader conclusions about its implications for human nature and existence. It is not a foregone conclusion, then, that education in STEM fields will achieve the goods at which it aims, unless the resulting knowledge is first recognized as fundamentally human and therefore necessarily understood in the broader context of the human good. Establishing this context is one of the fundamental tasks of liberal education, upon which the good of specialization thus depends. Presentation: In a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton, then a new professor of physics at the University of Puerto Rico, Albert Einstein wrote the following in response to Thornton’s desire to introduce the philosophy of science into his classroom: I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.1 1 Einstein to Thornton, December 7, 1944 (EA 61-574). 1 �The generational prejudice, the seeing of the trees but not the forest that Einstein described seems to me to be a common consequence of contemporary education, in large part because of our society’s focus on STEM education and corresponding disinterest in liberal education. My intention in this talk is to show how the task of fully reaping the fruits of STEM education cannot be separated from the project of liberal education, and that the latter is essential both on the part of scientists themselves and on the part of the broader populace if the former is to be achieved. In the interests of time, I shall focus primarily on the “science” part of STEM education. After the early modern era in which Francis Bacon declared that knowledge and power are really the same thing, science came to be seen by many as fundamentally oriented toward technological and practical application. In the modern era, this idea has taken such strong root that scientists have had to deal with politicians wishing to restrict public funding of scientific enterprise to areas that will have a significant practical application, as if this could always be known in advance. Disciplines in the humanities, such as philosophy, or liberal education in general, are ridiculed as a waste of time, their critics saying such things as “If it’s not producing food, I’m not interested.” Higher education has come to be seen as just being vocational training, with programs such as the St. John’s College liberal arts program considered outdated at best, almost a relic of a pre-scientific age. These sentiments lead us into the first issue I shall discuss. What such critics are really saying is that one ought not devote one’s life to activities that are not in some way conducive to human flourishing. Supposing that this is true, the conclusion that one ought not devote one’s life to the humanities or to liberal education does not immediately follow, since we cannot know whether this is conducive to human flourishing until we have established what human flourishing 2 �is. For example, the only we reason we care whether a discipline is producing food is because we care about food. But why do we care about food? Unless we are hedonists, it is principally (though not only) because we need food to live. But why do we care about living? Presumably because we wish to do something with our lives that goes beyond eating. Thus, it is clear that whatever this “something” is, it is worth doing even if it is not producing food. This example is an instance of a more general observation, namely that the extreme position that maintains that only what is useful is good is implicitly a contradiction in terms. For the useful is by definition useful for something, for the sake of another good; and the ultimate good, also by definition, cannot be for the sake of another good. In the human sphere, the ultimate good is the human good, human flourishing. Thus, again, it is pointless to criticize some branch of learning for not being useful unless we first know what human flourishing is. This issue arises in many concrete contexts, not just in abstract philosophical discussions. It lies behind the desire of some public figures to reduce funding for NASA, on the grounds that much of NASA’s research is not useful, or at least not obviously so. In a similar vein, sometimes people object to the production of GMO crops not just because they believe them unhealthy but also because they maintain a particular view of the human race’s relationship to nature and what constitutes the good of this relationship. The foregoing may give the impression that I see the role of liberal education to be restricted to the study of ethics and politics, in which the notions of human flourishing and the common good are considered. But the debate over human flourishing itself depends on prior theoretical philosophical questions, such as what it means to be human in the first place, and what the relationship of human beings to the rest of nature is. These questions cannot be escaped if one is to have a complete account of reality. And if one assumes from the start that one’s own 3 �discipline ought to yield such an account, one will naturally attempt to answer these questions from the perspective of that discipline. Thus we have the phenomenon of physicists, biologists, and other practitioners of the sciences lecturing the public on the “meaning” of their discoveries for human nature, the nature of the universe, and of existence itself. I do not mean to suggest that scientific inquiry never has relevance to these questions. Rather, I mean that the kind of relevance it has is subtle and difficult to discover, and one cannot hope to judge well of it without much learning and practice. The learning required, however, is not training in the hard sciences but rather liberal learning, which teaches one to consider human knowledge as a unified whole and to distinguish accurately the scope, nature, and limitations of each of its parts. This is why interpretation of the results of scientific inquiry is naturally posterior to liberal education. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. Physicist Sean Carroll, in a thoughtprovoking article entitled “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” writes about the types of issues that arise in debates over abortion, such as the notions of life and personhood, and argues that it would be foolish to think that scientific knowledge of the world cannot bear on questions such as these. Regarding this general claim, I think Carroll is quite right. But, as is typical in such cases, when he attempts to apply the general principle to specific cases, he mistakes his philosophical presuppositions for the conclusions of science. Science, he writes, tells us that there is no magical moment at which an incorporeal soul takes up residence in a body. Indeed, the concept of a “person” is not to be found anywhere 4 �in the natural world; it’s a category that is convenient to appeal to as we try to make sense of the world.2 Now, physical science does strongly suggest something relevant to the concept of soul, which is that (as Carroll himself points out) however closely one inspects the matter of living things, one will not find it following physical laws different from those followed by inanimate matter. But soul is a fairly nebulous concept, and there is still a long way from the claims of physics to Carroll’s interpretation of them. Likewise, that “person” is not a concept in physics is not much more significant for debates over abortion legislation than the fact that the same could be said of “tax return” is significant for economic policy debates. The general point is that it is actually very difficult to delineate precisely what philosophical, ethical, or otherwise humanitarian implications the scientific worldview ought to have for our broader human worldview. And it is exceedingly unlikely that one will be able to do this well if one has never even studied that broader worldview and the writings of the thinkers who formed and influenced it. Yet this is implicitly what we expect when we encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields without first exposing them to the liberal education that will allow them to understand what they are actually doing in those fields and how it relates to their lives as human lives and not merely as employees. What does all of this mean concretely? I am aware, of course, that universal liberal education is not in the cards for the foreseeable future. A more plausible first step is the recognition of disciplinary boundaries. Someone need not be an expert in physics to recognize 2 Sean Carroll, “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” Discover Magazine, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/abortion-and-the-architecture-ofreality/#.VBeNaBagv-o (accessed September 15, 2014). 5 �that the physicist is stepping outside of his discipline when he speaks about free will, or the soul, or the meaning of life; or to see that medical training does not automatically render a person competent to speak about ethical matters. Yet questions about these things arise perennially, and if the scientist as such is not the expert on them, someone else must be. Until we are able to distinguish between questions that the hard sciences can and cannot answer, we will be unable to see the value of the education that actually does teach one to answer the questions that STEM cannot, nor even see the true value in STEM itself. I want to conclude by saying a few words on that last topic, lest I seem to belittle or denigrate the natural sciences, which I in no way intend. Though a philosopher, not a scientist, by profession, I have an amateur’s (in the etymological sense of that word) interest in natural science and have the honor of teaching it via my own institution’s interdisciplinary program. In the process, I have come to realize that the profundity of the modern scientific worldview faces severe impoverishment if it is approached without a background in liberal education. The significance of the historical shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism simply cannot be appreciated by one who has never dwelt on the thoughts of generations to whom the evidence of heliocentrism was unavailable. I am told that something close to forty percent of Americans reject the biological theory of evolution. This is true even of many who are well-educated, which suggests that a lack of scientific training is not the root cause. For many, religious issues are at stake, but I suspect that this is only a special case of the more general problem I have been describing, which is that we have lost the habit of understanding scientific discoveries in the context of our broader worldviews. As a result, the public frequently receives ideas such as evolution alongside shallow and ill-informed explanations of their “true meaning.” Richard Dawkins is a well-known culprit in this regard. Dawkins is a fine biologist, but he is not a great 6 �philosopher—he is a scientist who suffers, as Einstein said, from the prejudices of his generation, seeing the trees but not the forest. This sort of behavior is ultimately detrimental to science itself, which is really much richer than is suggested by presentations of it stripped of human context. Though superficially science may seem to be more exalted by a culture that has lost its sense of the importance of liberal learning, in the end it cannot help but be degraded by the same. 7 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and STEM education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Michael Bolin at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolin, Michael J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Mathematics -- Study and teaching Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004522 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dbedae9f79c0e8da02a00ff737cf40cb.pdf 14603695335a729ddd0ab22eebf856d0 PDF Text Text LIBERAL EDUCATION AND THE QUESTION OF TRUTH David Arndt Saint Mary’s College of California We’re here to talk about a simple question: What is the point of liberal education? What does it aim at? What is the good we try to move toward through the liberal arts? Let me venture a simple answer: liberal education aims at truth. For liberal learning, truth is the highest good. The point of liberal education is to learn to move--through dialogue with others and through our own thinking--towards the light of truth. But this answer raises other questions: What are we looking for when we look for truth? What kinds of truth are proper to the liberal arts? In what sense can the liberal arts make claims to truth? What is truth? If we want to think seriously about these questions, ! think, we have to come to terms with the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger worked out a distinctive understanding of truth, and also a history of concepts of truth in the West. This history of truth can help to illuminate the history of liberal education, and to clarify in what sense liberal education aims at truth. Let me try to sketch this story, starting from the beginning. What were the origins of liberal education? How was the end of liberal education originally understood? And what notion of truth was implicit in this original understanding? " The Traditional Ends of Liberal Education We know there has actually never been any consensus on the final end of liberal education. Ideas about liberal education have been divided between two traditions. In one tradition, liberal education aims to prepare students for a life of political freedom, by training them in the arts they needed to be active and responsible citizens. This is explicit in Cicero, who defined the liberal arts as “the arts that are proper to a free citizen.”1 The emphasis in this tradition was on the arts of grammar and rhetoric. And the ultimate aim liberal education was #$ό&'()*--judgment, prudence, the ability to see singularities for what they are, to understand what kind of action is called for by each singular situation. 1 �In another tradition, liberal education prepares students for a life of intellectual freedom by training them in the arts they needed to liberate themselves from thoughtless adherence to inherited opinions. The emphasis in this tradition was on the arts of logic and dialectic, as well as the forms of mathematics that were paradigms of clear thought. The ultimate aim of liberal education was (+#ί---wisdom, an understanding of what is essential to a good life. This is explicit in Seneca, who wrote: “there is only one really liberal study,--that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom.”2 Despite their differences, both traditions shared a common assumption: scientific knowledge was only one form of understanding among others. In addition to science, or ./)(0ή2', they distinguished opinion, know-how, judgement, and wisdom (3ό4-, 0έ6&', #$ό&'()* and (+#ί-). Each form of understanding was a distinct path to truth. Heidegger knew that truth has been conceived in different ways. In the allegory of the cave, Plato thought of truth primarily as a matter or likeness (ὁ2+ί8()*) or correctness (ὀ$:ό0'*). For Aristotle the locus of truth was not between beings and their ideas but between what we think and what is: “The false and the true are not in things (themselves)...but in the intellect.”3 For Aquinas the primary locus of truth was the intellect of God: “Truth is properly encountered in the human or in the divine intellect.”4 With Descartes truth became a matter of representation and certainty--the locus of truth is the representation of an object in the mind of a subject: “I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me.”5 While Kant distinguished the objects of experience from things in themselves, he retained the traditional concept of truth as a kind of correspondence: “What is truth? The nominal definition of truth, that it is the agreement of knowledge with its object, is assumed as granted.”6 But Heidegger argued all these concepts assume truth is a matter of correspondence between thought and reality. In his view, this view of truth as correspondence has dominated most of the philosophical tradition. " The Challenge of Modern Science Heidegger thought this traditional concept of truth shifted with the emergence of modern science. Modern science was founded on different understanding of truth, and this understanding of truth underlies the institutions of the modern research university. Modern philosophers accepted the traditional concept of truth as a matter of correspondence between thought and reality. But they altered this concept of truth in two decisive ways: they assumed that the test of truth is certainty, i.e. that no belief can 2 �be considered true unless it is known for certain; and they assumed that certainty could be established only on the basis of evidence so clear and distinct that it is indubitable to any rational mind. These two new assumptions were most clearly articulated by Descartes in the first rule of scientific method laid down in his Discourse on Method: The first [rule] was never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid hasty judgment and prejudice; and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it into doubt.7 This intrication of truth and certainty is still commonly taken for granted today, even by the most skeptical thinkers; skeptics tend to deny that truth is attainable precisely because they assume knowledge must be certain in order to be true. Modern scientists are cautious about claiming to have final and definitive truth precisely because they know most scientific findings are never certain and always provisional. The power of this concept of truth is undeniable. The world in which we live has been shaped by the scientific methods it grounds and guides. Here we have to distinguish between science and scientism. Science is a search for universally valid knowledge. Scientism is the belief that modern science is the only genuine form of knowledge. A scientist is a practitioner of science, not a believer in scientism. To be critical of scientism is not in any way to denigrate science itself. The challenge to the traditional liberal arts came not from modern science, understood as a universally valid yet distinct and limited form of knowledge. The challenge came instead from scientism, the uncritical belief that modern science is the only genuine form of understanding, and that scientific truth is the only genuine form of truth. This belief was articulated with exemplary clarity in 1880 by Thomas Huxley, who argued that “liberal education” should be re-founded on “an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in accordance with the scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth.”8 This scientism challenged the notion of truth underlying the traditions of liberal education. The intrication of truth and certainty reversed the traditional hierarchy of forms of understanding. The highest form of understanding was no longer either judgment or wisdom but scientific knowledge; the highest kind of truth was not a clear understanding of how to act in our particular situation, or how to live well in general, but quantitative knowledge based on factual evidence.9 " 3 �One effect of this reversal was that the search for wisdom was delegitimated as unscientific. Many thinkers dismissed as sophistry or illusion any claim to nonscientific truth, and consigned whole disciplines of thought to oblivion. This de-legitimation was expressed with exemplary clarity by the philosopher David Hume: When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.10 Scientism had an especially powerful effect on the humanities. Once scientific truth was held to be the only real form of truth, the humanities could no longer be approached as sources of truth. Humanists generally responded to this challenge in one of two ways. On the one hand, there have been attempts to cast the humanities into the mold of the modern sciences. Philosophers have tried to remake their discipline into “a rigorous science.” Historians have tried to model their discipline on the natural sciences, and to find universal laws governing the phenomena of history. Classicists have come to think of their discipline not as part of a living tradition but as the study of dead languages. Humanistic study was re-conceived as quasi-scientific research.11 On the other hand, there have been attempts to re-conceive the humanities as disciplines aimed at something other than truth. Some humanists have claimed the goal of humanistic education is primarily aesthetic--the formation of an aesthetic sensibility. Others have claimed the point of humanistic education is primarily ethical--the cultivation of the virtues proper to a given ethos. Others have claimed the aim of the humanities is ultimately political--to promote justice by raising consciousness and demystifying the ideologies that support injustice. While both responses have produced valuable work in the humanities, they have distorted the traditional aims of liberal education insofar as they no longer approach the humanities as a way to wisdom or a search for truths higher than scientific truth. " Liberal Education and Truth We have to retrieve and refine the traditional ends of liberal education. And to do so we have to offer a clear critique of prevailing models of higher education today. We have to 4 �explain how liberal education has been distorted by the assumptions underlying the modern research university. We have to be able to explain both the legitimacy and the limits of the view of education embodied by the research university. We have to respond to the challenge of the research university by drawing on the resources of the liberal intellectual tradition in order to retrieve, refine, and rethink the assumptions that sustained the traditional liberal arts college. The first task is to rethink traditional concepts of truth. We need a critique of scientism that shows both the legitimacy and the limits of scientific truth. And we need to explain in what sense one can speak of non-scientific truths--truths of art, history, interpretation, and scripture. To do this we have to retrieve an understanding of truth that runs through the Western traditions without ever being fully grasped in conceptual thought--the understanding of truth as the kind of illumination or disclosure that Heidegger called “unconcealment.” We already have a rough understanding of truth in this sense when we speak of a “moment of truth”--an instant when something that has been obscure suddenly comes to light and becomes clearly apparent. In this idiom, “the moment of truth,” truth is implicitly understood not as a correspondence between thought and reality, but as the illumination or disclosure that underlies truth in the traditional sense--that first makes possible any correspondence or non-correspondence between thought and reality. This sense of truth as unconcealment is implicit but unnoticed in many classic works. It is already legible in Plato’s allegory of the cave, where the movement of the prisoners is not simply from semblance to reality, or from a less correct to a more correct vision, but from a place from which the sun is hidden to a place where the sunlit landscape is disclosed and illuminated. This sense of truth as unconcealment is also implicit but not grasped conceptually in a certain Christian understanding of the revelatory power of language; it is legible in the notion that the truth of the Gospel parables lies in their power to unearth and disclose what--like a treasure hidden in a field--has been hidden since the foundations of the world.12 " The aim of Heidegger’s thought was not to return us to a Greek concept of truth, but to clarify an understanding of truth we already have without knowing it, to grasp explicitly what we already understand in a thoughtless and inarticulate way. " The implications of Heidegger’s concept of truth cannot be summarized in a few pages. Let me just emphasize two basic points: " 5 �First, the concept of unconcealment helps to clarify the truth of judgment (#$ό&'()*). A judgment may be perfectly correct, in the sense it accurately corresponds to certain facts of a matter, and yet may be profoundly untrue, in the sense that it focuses on what is inessential and utterly fails to illuminate the heart of the matter. A judgment is true not when it adequately represents what is superficial and inessential, but when it reveals and brings to light the essential. So the truth of judgment is not ultimately a matter of correspondence but of revelation, illumination, unconcealment. Heidegger made this point in a lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “#$ό&'()*...eminently illustrates the meaning of ἀ-<:.ύ.)&, i.e. the uncovering of something concealed.”13 Second, the concept of unconcealment also helps to clarify the truth of wisdom ((+#ί-). Even at the crudest level of everyday understanding, we have a sense that wisdom cannot be contained in propositions, and that the truth of wisdom cannot be understood as a correspondence of thought with reality. Instead, we sense that to be wise means to have a clear vision of what is essential to a good life. The truth of this vision is not a matter of correctness, but of its power to disclose and illuminate what really matters. So Heidegger also understood the truth of wisdom as unconcealment: “(+#ί- is the other highest possibility of ἀ<':.ύ.)&.” 14 The concept of truth as unconcealment helps to distinguish three dimensions of thought, and three movements we have to make in order to move toward truth. In one dimension we move from ignorance to knowledge. Knowledge can be directly transmitted from professor to student. So this movement occurs as a progressive accumulation of facts and skills conveyed to the student by textbooks and lectures. The truth of this kind of knowledge is a matter of correspondence and certainty--a correspondence between thought and reality, which is certain only if it is grounded on absolutely clear and distinct evidence. In a second dimension we move from average towards genuine understanding--from an understanding that is more or less shallow, confused, vague, simplistic, and crude, towards an understanding that is deep, clear, precise, complex, and refined. This kind of understanding is essential to both judgement and wisdom, #$ό&'()* and (+#ί-. The truth of this understanding is a matter of unconcealment--the disclosure and illumination of what things are. This kind of truth cannot be directly transmitted from professor to student. It is a kind of truth students have to reach through their own thought and experience. This is why students have to make a third movement: In a third dimension we move from an inauthentic towards authentic understanding-from an understanding that is not really our own (one that we have simply because we 6 �share it in common with others) towards an understanding that is truly our own in the sense that it is based on our own experience, reading, discussion, and thought. So to look for truth we have to make three movements: We have to move from ignorance to knowledge. We have to move from an average to a genuine understanding of things. But in order to make this movement we also have to move from an inauthentic to a more authentic understanding, that is, we have to take on ourselves the responsibility to read closely, to listen carefully, to try to find the grains of truth in different points of view, and then, in light of our own experience and on the basis of our own thoughts, to work out our own understanding of what is true. This is why--in a liberal education-students are asked not to learn the thoughts of others, but to give their own thoughts. How do we make these three movements of thought? What are the disciplines that enable us to move toward knowledge, toward genuine understanding, and towards authenticity? What art the arts proper to this search for truth? They are the arts proper to liberal education: not just the seven classic liberal arts; but also the arts practiced here at Saint John’s: reading, listening, questioning, discussing, writing, thinking, and of meditation. The aim of these arts is truth--not just the truth of knowledge but the truth of judgement and wisdom. The point of a liberal arts education is to enable students to move--in dialogue with the tradition and with other people--toward the light of truth. " Conclusion Let me sum up. Liberal education was originally guided by traditional assumptions about the nature of truth. These assumptions supported the distinctive institutions of the liberal arts college: its curricula; pedagogies; disciplinary divisions; the roles of faculty and students; and the discourse in which education was understood. These institutions were challenged with the emergence of modern science, whose founders radically reconceived the nature of truth. These new concepts of truth laid the foundations of the modern scientific research university and its distinctive institutions: the library, the laboratory, the lecture hall, autonomous departments, and the elective system. But the research university did not simply replace the liberal arts college. Instead, liberal arts colleges were largely uprooted from their underlying assumptions, and incorporated into the modern research university. In the process, the liberal arts were re-cast in the mold of the modern sciences, and were reinterpreted in light of the assumptions about truth underlying the research university. These new concepts of truth have distorted and concealed the traditional meaning of liberal education. 7 �Liberal arts colleges have to clarify in what sense liberal education aims at truth. And to do so we have to offer a clear critique of prevailing models of higher education today. We have to explain how liberal education has been distorted by the assumptions underlying the modern research university. We have to be able to explain both the legitimacy and the limits of the view of education embodied by the research university. We have to respond to the challenge of the research university by drawing on the resources of the liberal intellectual tradition in order to retrieve, refine, and rethink the ends of liberal education. 8 �Notes Cicero, De Oratore, 1.72. Quoted in Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: The College Entrance Examination Board, 1995) 36. 1 Seneca, Letter LXXXVIII. On Liberal and Vocational Studies” in Letter from a Stoic, tr. Robin Campbell (New York: Penguin Books, 1969) 159. 2 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredenick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 307 (1027b25). 4 Aquinas, quoted in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 178. 5 René Descartes, “From the Letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642,” in Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. by Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 123. 6 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965) 97. René Descartes, The Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998) 11. 7 Thomas Huxley, “Science and Culture,” quoted in Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995) 171 (italics added). 8 This reversal is most clearly expressed by the words carved in stone on the façade of the Social Science Research Building at the University of Chicago: “If you cannot measure, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory.” This inscription is a paraphrase of Lord Kelvin’s dictum: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.” Kelvin’s words are quoted at zapatopi.net/kelvin/quotes/. The inscription is discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) 178. 9 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 165. 10 9 �Classics for example became largely a branch of philology. One still studied Greek and Roman texts, not as sources of a living tradition but as one set of objects among others. This approach obliterated the original rationale for the study of classics. Hence the proliferation of spurious rationales, such as the theory of "mental discipline." 11 There were also attempts to remake history on the model of the new sciences. There was, for example, a search for laws of history analogous to the laws of nature. This analogy was explicit in Marxism; Engels wrote that "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." (Friedrich Engels, quoted in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994, p. 388) There were also attempts to make philosophy a science in the modern sense, and to reject all previous philosophy as "metaphysical," that is, unscientific nonsense. Matthew 13:34-5 and 13:44. “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden [>.>$?22έ&-] since the foundation of the world.” “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden [>.>$?22έ&8] in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (New Revised Standard Version.) 12 Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 36. 13 14 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 42. 10 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 10 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and the question of truth Description An account of the resource Paper delivered on October 18, 2014 by David Arndt at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Arndt, David D. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004518 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a5e2c8e5411cda408bc5ae2ea3707f34.pdf 8ac49eac88a8ce8a34508f445db5a40d PDF Text Text 1    Liberal Education as Preparation for Interdisciplinary Science  Geoffrey M. Henebry PhD CSE (SF ’82), South Dakota State University  As this talk is a witnessing for the efficacy of liberal education as preparation for  interdisciplinary science, let me begin with a personal prologue to provide context. I am  tenured full professor of Natural Resource Management at South Dakota State  University, and Co‐Director of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, an  interdisciplinary research group of 45 with an annual budget of over $5 million.   I earned my B.A. from St. John’s in 1982, attending Annapolis for two years and  finishing in Santa Fe. My graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) are in environmental  sciences. I met my wife, Ana who is from Brazil, in graduate school in Texas. We have  seven children (aged 14 to 27) whom we have homeschooled while living the  peripatetic academic lifestyle: a post‐doctoral position at Kansas State University, a  Fulbright Research Fellowship in Brazil, and faculty positions at Rutgers‐Newark,  University of Nebraska‐Lincoln, and South Dakota State University.   I serve on the editorial boards of three scientific journals, on the NASA Land Cover  Land Use Change Science Team, and as Chair of the Advisory Committee of the USA‐ National Phenology Network. In short, I have been able to leverage my liberal  education into a successful career as a research scientist and professor.   ~~ */\* ~~  We are witness to increasing globalization of technophilic cultures that value the  instrumentality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics or STEM. While  the reinforcement of disciplinary boundaries within STEM remains strong, there is  increasing recognition of need for interdisciplinary engagement to address myriad  complex problems of health, environments, and governance that arise from our  socioeconomic activities.   Major federal funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the  National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,  have established in recent years programs to sponsor research that explicitly bridges  across disciplinary boundaries. Such projects are considered higher risk than traditional  disciplinary research due to the “boundary work” required to enable scientists and  �2    engineers from different—often contrasting—intellectual lineages to communicate their  expertise in mutually intelligible ways.  I propose that liberal education can provide valuable solid preparation for  “boundary workers” to craft practices of interdisciplinary science.  Of the trivium  grammar and logic enable the establishment of conceptual frameworks and disciplinary  practice; whereas; rhetoric stands out as solvent for disciplinary borders.  Rhetoric in  scientific narrative is key to spanning assumptions and reconciling viewpoints.    What I offer here is not a disquisition. I am not a scholar of teaching and learning.  Nor do I study the history or philosophy of science. I am just a professional scientist.  So  I can offer a report from the front lines about practicing interdisciplinary science,  training Ph.D. students, and mentoring post‐docs and young faculty to succeed as  professional scientists.   My primary field is ecology, the study of how living and non‐living things interact  to shape the biosphere, that thin layer of habitable space mostly on the surface of this  planet. Key to my investigations are datastreams from the constellation of earth‐ observing sensors orbiting this planet that sense the various kinds of electromagnetic  radiation rising from the surface—from the visible part of the spectrum through the  near, middle, and thermal infrared regions all the way into the microwaves.  (Did you  realize that you emit photons of microwaves?) And I do a lot of international work with  past and present projects in European Russia, Central Asia, Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil,  Ethiopia, and recently at the continental scale.    Imagine more than 20,000 scientists converging on San Francisco for a week each  December for the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). With  attendance growing by 85% in the past decade, the AGU is a truly global meeting with  participants from every continent. It is a union in the literal sense of the word: diverse  disciplines banding together to achieve economies of scale and thereby enabling  interactions that span across and between scientific disciplines.   We walk into Moscone Center’s South exhibition hall. Across the 300,000 square feet  are arranged aisle after aisle of boards displaying posters describing the latest in  scientific research about the earth system, from earthquakes to electrical phenomena in  the upper atmosphere, from measuring the various ways that water flows above and  below the land to observing how vegetation grows and changes in and next to  �3    megacities and in the far‐flung reaches of cloud‐obscured tropical rainforests, among  thousands of other topics.    As we walk down one of those aisles we see text and pictures on the posters and the  key words being exchanged that are mostly in an alien tongue. But once we close our  eyes to listen to the form and character of the interactions rather than the content— interactions between questioner and respondent, between student and mentor, between  the striving post‐docs and eminent graybeards—what we discover is that these, too, are  from a tribe of science, just not ours.   But what are the tribes of science?   In 2012, according to a recent Census Bureau study [1], 42 million in the workforce  between 25 and 64 held at least a bachelor’s degree. Of these 12% were in STEM  occupations and another 11% in STEM‐related jobs (architecture and health care). Of  those with a STEM degree, just over one‐quarter are in STEM occupations and another  11% are in STEM‐related occupations, leaving 63% in non‐STEM jobs.  Of those with a  non‐STEM degree, 92% are in non‐STEM occupations.   Figure 1 comes from that Census Bureau report [1] and shows where STEM majors  work.  I want to emphasize two things evident in this graph. First, STEM is really  TESM. “T” for technology dominates – these are the “computer workers”. Engineering  is a strong second, and all the sciences—physical, life, and social comprise but 16% of  the STEM workforce. “Math workers” account for a modest yet important 3%. The  second important thing the graph shows is that many STEM majors do not end up  working in STEM fields.    Figure 2 shows the meager flow of non‐STEM majors into STEM occupations [1]. If  we lump the literature and languages and liberal arts and history major groups, we find  that just 5.4% end up in STEM occupations. If we restrict our focus to the sciences, then  just 1.1% of these majors become science workers in the physical, life, and social  sciences.         �4      Figure 1:  Where STEM majors end up in the general workforce. Graphic captured from  http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem‐html/        �5       Figure 2:  Where non‐STEM majors end up in the general workforce. Graphic captured  from http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem‐html/    Let’s ask again: what are the tribes of science? One answer is that there are as many  tribes of science as there as recognizable disciplines. Within a tribe members share  conceptual schemata full of technical terms that refer precisely to things of interest, but  which sound like jargon to the uninitiated. Yet disciplinary specialization proliferates as  the bodies of knowledge grow. Sometimes disciplines converge and fuse, but far more  often they subdivide messily. So can scientists from different tribes collaborate? And if  so, then how do they work together? Over the past two decades or so there has been a  re‐orientation of science and, importantly, science funding agencies toward seeking  �6    understanding about complex problems that involve interactions between human  settlements and their supporting ecosystems.   ~~ */\* ~~  Scientists tell stories—highly structured, tightly condensed—but stories nonetheless.  Liberal education, too, revels in stories and in the great conversation. It is the great  conversation, the connecting of ideas spanning space and time, which teaches and  hones rhetoric. Listening is a critical aspect of rhetoric because persuasive speech  requires engagement with others.  Seminar simulates sitting around a table with  scientists from diverse disciplines. I propose that the liberal art of rhetoric enables the  bridging across disciplines: the liberally educated boundary worker can identify the key  elements of the story above the particularities of the jargon that enforces disciplinary  borders.   I would like to share briefly three of the several interdisciplinary projects in which I  have played a key role.   The first project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was about sand,  water, and grass. It asked a simple question: why does the largest dune field in the  western hemisphere, the Sandhills of Nebraska, tend to stay vegetated in the face of  environmental stresses like drought and grazing? After all, the grass cover is mostly  sparse and can be grazed down to nothing within several days. Why are they not bare  moving dunes like we see at White Sands in New Mexico or the Sahara desert in North  Africa?    To address this question we assembled a team of ecologists, hydrologists,  climatologists, and geologists, mostly from the same university. Now this sounds like a  rather harmless bunch of “ologists” but how these four disciplines conduct their science  is radically different because of the kinds of evidence or data they collect to construct  their stories. It took a full year of frequent meetings before we were able to bridge the  differences in narrative structure and quality of evidence to develop a successful  proposal for a four‐year study that included a large landscape manipulative experiment  to test our hypotheses. We were able to answer the question and learn to pose many  other interesting questions besides! And this is the hallmark of science – to ask  questions, albeit in a particular manner.   �7    The second project, sponsored by NASA, is still underway. It asks how urban areas  influence the behavior of severe storms. In particular it seeks to understand how the  size and shape of the city and the pollution state of the urban air affects the interaction  of storm and city. The project involves satellite imagery and derived products, weather  radar data, and computer models of weather. So the team includes mesoscale  meteorologists to run the models that simulate the storms, radar meteorologists to  analyze the weather radar time series, atmospheric chemists to make sense of the  interactions between the differently polluted rural and urban air, landscape ecologists  to track how cities affect the growing season of vegetation, remote sensing scientists  specializing in cities to character size and shape, and a professor of landscape and  urban planning to help formulate findings from the science community into the  language of the design community.  The project involves scientists at six universities  and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, a government agency located in Norman,  Oklahoma. In addition to the logistical challenges of having project meetings, there is  again the challenge of learning the differences in scientific narrative across fields.   The last project I will highlight is the most ambitious and potentially the most far‐ reaching. It involves epidemiologists, ecologists, software engineers, and public health  officials. The National Institutes of Health, specifically the National Institute of Allergy  and Infectious Disease, has been funding us since 2009 to develop a forecasting system  to warn public health officials and early responders, such as non‐governmental  organizations (NGOs), about when environmental conditions are ripe for the outbreak  of epidemic malaria in the Amhara highlands of Ethiopia.   Malaria is one of the great scourges of humanity. Millions in the tropics live in areas  where malaria is endemic, it is always around and so its threat is well known. In  highland areas malaria is not endemic, its transmission is unstable, and mortality is  rare. But sometimes conditions are favorable for a generalized outbreak, an epidemic.  The public and private health systems are then rapidly overwhelmed and mortality  rates are very high.  What are those environmental conditions that set the stage for an  epidemic? Can they be monitored and then predicted? How to communicate useful  information to the public health officials?  Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa at about 95 million. It is a  mountainous country, with more than three‐quarters of peaks on African continent. The  population is overwhelming rural—more than 80% live outside of cities—and it is poor.  �8    The literacy rate is among the lowest in the world. It is estimated that fewer than half  the males and fewer than 30% of the females aged 15 and older can read. Thus, once we  can forecast increased risk of an epidemic communicating it is a challenge, both  technological and cultural.   Let me mention just one example. To write the code to build a computer system that  interacts both with scientists and public health officials requires eliciting from each  group their requirements for the system. Discerning what is important from what is  desirable and reconciling different requirements is surprisingly difficult task! However,  rhetorical skills are once again crucial to the process: listening, synthesizing, and  repeating in different words to build consensus. And coffee helps, too.      ~~ */\* ~~  To conclude, I want to speak to the question of “What is liberal education for?”  There is an answer in the motto of St. John’s College: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque.  Google Translate renders it as “I do have children with free books debtor appealed”,  which points to the need for Latinists to improve the Technologists’ grasp of grammar!  A proper translation of the motto reads ʺI make free men out of children by means of  books and a balance.” This process of making free men and women is a preparing for  the rest of life – a transforming of children into adults. Liberal education provides the  foundation for choosing, intelligently, what is next and provides the awareness and  skills to excel at that next stage. Liberal education is, indeed, preparation for  interdisciplinary science, and countless other paths as well.     Reference   [1] Liana Christin Landivar, 2013, “The Relationship between Science and Engineering  Education and Employment in STEM Occupations,” American Community Survey  Reports, ACS‐23, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC.     Thursday, December 04, 2014  Brookings, SD  � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education as preparation for the interdisciplinary science Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Geoffrey Henebry at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Henebry, Geoffrey M. (Geoffrey Michael), 1960- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004532 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/86d7040e606d30f21673274c8e0b46d7.pdf 0332721653a9c394160824f9e57c9a49 PDF Text Text 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. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mirza, Mahan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004546 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5833299bd9ccb17e9e3f0ff2f9d8a699.pdf a0f0454c8605a9807f9a4373d38d47a0 PDF Text Text 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  � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition : visions and seminal texts Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Shih Yu "Franklyn" Wu at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Wu, Shiyu Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Buddhism -- Philosophy Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004557