LiberalArtsOnline Volume 2, Number 1
January 2003
by John Agresto
Past President
St. John's College
Section II -- Wherein the Liberal Arts Are Redeemed, in Part
We have discussed how the liberal arts, as distinct from professional training or learning a trade, might have great personal value and use, but now we have a harder time making the case for their public value and use. These arts neither sow nor reap, neither do they build. "President of a liberal arts college?" a noted teaching physician once sniffed at me. "You've taken a few of my most promising students and turned them into poets. Now the world is worse off, and so are they."
We stiffen when we hear this, and give a feeble or smug retort; but the dart has hit home. So we tell our students that they can gain a profession later; that they should become 'well-rounded' while they can; that career decisions are better when the whole of the intellectual life with all its fields are canvassed first. And we sheepishly turn the liberal arts, once ends unto themselves, into preparatory courses for the next and more real world.
Even the fine arts, which give adornment to the world and enjoyment its people, have an easier case to make than the liberal arts. That I now have a deeper appreciation of a Euclidian proof, or Suzie is learning Latin, may be of comfort to me and to Suzie; but why should anyone else care?
But perhaps we shouldn't begin by looking for public value; at least, not at first. Perhaps we should simply recognize the fact that we are, by nature, creatures who desire to know. And what we most want to know are answers to the deepest human questions - questions of love and hate, justice and evil, noble and base, God and nature and the cosmos. These are the issues of the liberal arts at their best. At their peak, the liberal arts give to every individual capable of being with them insight and knowledge and delight. Now none of this is of any immediate public utility; but it is of inestimable private value and satisfies a demand deep within our natures.
More -- In the study of literature I learn more about human nature than I could know through experience. I now have greater insights into the motives of others, their foibles, and their and my psychology. Never again will I be so easily fooled. I will study nature and learn of her secrets. I will study rhetoric and gain persuasive power. I will study grammar and language and cultures. Soon I will speak well, listen well, be amused, gain insight into the acts of others, and be better able to bring them over to my own views and desires.
But in saying all this we have gone beyond pointing out that the liberal arts satisfy some hunger in the soul, to saying something more: the liberal arts are a kind of empowerment to the possessor. To be sure, we have to admit that as many have condemned the liberal arts for this empowerment as have defended it. In the arsenal of a Lincoln or a Churchill, rhetoric is preeminently useful. In the arsenal of a Gorgias or a Caesar, it is destructive. It is useful to society only when attached to men of good disposition. But, I'm afraid the liberal arts are fairly prostitute, and will bestow their charms on the good and bad alike.
So, where are we? First, we find out that the liberal arts have seemingly served less of a public function than the professional arts or even the fine arts. Then, we find out that they might increase the pleasure of the possessor, but not increase the enjoyment of others. Then we find out that, in the wrong hands, they work against the common good by empowering men of questionable virtue. And, I have to admit, that I also have a sinking suspicion that the liberal arts are more or less powerless to turn bad people around.
Still, this republic has cherished from its very beginning its great liberal arts institutions, and we are not a people much given to foolery. There must be something of value - of true public value - for Americans to have preserved, protected and promoted these institutions for now into four centuries.
Perhaps, ironically, it has something to do with the idea that, historically, the liberal arts are connected to the cultivation of gentlemen and gentlewomen. Not that democracies have much truck with aristocracy. But there is something that aristocracies have and democracies lack. Democracies tend to live wholly in the present, whereas aristocracies understand, and revere, the ancestral. In a real way, the liberal arts have the capacity to give to democracy what it cannot make on its own.
If we stop looking at the liberal arts as a set of arts, that is, as a set of skills, and look at their content, we see that the best place-in fact, the only place-that keeps alive the ancestral, the patrimony, and the heritage of culture, is the liberal arts. Yes, we recognize the radical, antinomian, prodding, questioning aspects of the liberal arts. But we also know that, without the liberal arts, there would be no Homer to read, no Virgil to imitate, no Plutarch to learn from, no Bach to admire. This is no small thing, though it would take another essay to unpack why it is I think that our culture's greatest thinkers and artists are worth passing on, why they define for us what it means to be civilized, and why preserving their works and their memory is not only an educational act, but an act of justice.
So back to the question of utility. On the positive side of the utility balance, we have a sense that the liberal arts satisfy something distinctly human inside of us, a craving to know that seems to be natural and innate. Secondly, the liberal arts are personally empowering. They give us insight without experience. And I have just added a third utility, a public one -- that the liberal arts keep alive the memory and the work of those who have done great things for us.
Since I introduced the topic of democracy into this discussion of public utility, let me twist the issue one more way. I think it goes something like this: the liberal arts may have once been the domain of gentlemen rulers, but in this democracy we are all gentlemen rulers. We all rule now. If so, what characteristics do I want my co-rulers to have? Ignorant of the past? Ruled by slogans and unexamined opinions? Easily moved by emotion and demagogic appeal? Easily duped because they lack the conception of the evil possibilities of our natures? Ignorant of our laws and mores and the reasons behind them? Forgetting of those who sacrificed for them, and why? Do we look for neighbors who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else?
No, I think the public sees the liberal arts for what they are: as a way of making society smarter, more intelligent, more careful and thoughtful in areas that matter. The public does not see this issue with any unanimity or consistency, but they sense that the cultivation of mind and sensibility that the liberal arts impart gives something like the benefit of aristocracy to the democratic life.
Let me reflect on Cardinal Newman: Liberal education, he pointed out, gives two things: first, to the individual "it gives a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments-a truth in developing them, and eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what's sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It shows him how to influence others, how to come to an understanding with them, and how to bear with them. He has the repose of the mind that lives with itself, and has the resources for its happiness."
Second, to society: "It is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end. It aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, cultivating the public mind, supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aim to popular aspirations, giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, and refining the intercourse of private life."
In so short a space those words seem to say so little; but I think, in the end, they say it all.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.