I’ll be publishing this essay in three parts. This first part will deal with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the current sad state of affairs in our universities and research labs. I would even write of the sad state of affairs in the minds of modern Western men, as individuals and as communal beings. The second part will deal with an essay by Peter Augustine Lawler, Defending the Humanities, dealing with a commencement address given by Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. The third part will deal with my personal take on this, largely an apologia of the last 25 frustrating and seemingly wasted years of my life, that is, an apologia of my efforts to provide a worldview, which is a somewhat disparaged term I’m willing to take over and use for my understanding of created being and its relationship to the Creator. Modern-day humanists, literary men and philosophers and theologians and historians and others are devoted to passing on a tradition allied with the moral goodness, including freedom, of Western Civilization but they don’t seem to notice that the tradition is itself a phase of Western Civilization which reflects earlier understandings of the explorable, empirical realms of created being. We men of the West inhabit a great work become a lie and we haven’t yet shown the courage and the faith to speak the deeper and richer truths we now see in created being, the thoughts God manifested as sufficient for the story He’s telling.
Donald Kagan was the Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2002. At his retirement in May, he gave a valedictory lecture which was slightly rewritten for publication as an essay: Ave atque vale. After describing the goals of a liberal education, more or less constant over the centuries: to learn how to live as a free man, he tells us:
Servants were ignorant and parochial, so free men must be learned and cosmopolitan; servants were ruled by others, so free men must take part in their own government; servants specialized to become competent at some specific and limited task, so free men must know something of everything and understand general principles without yielding to the narrowness of expertise. The Romans’ recommended course of study was literature, history, philosophy, and rhetoric.
Education in the liberal arts was intended to teach men how to be free. The understanding of what was needed to be free changed over the centuries and seems to have become itself somewhat instrumentalist in recent centuries in the Anglo-American countries. This is a possible good since, at least in my way of looking at being, the `ideal’ and the `instrumental’, soul and body if you wish, are different aspects of created being and not different realms or different substances. For the past couple centuries, there has been a growing and now dominant concensus that freedom is best secured by the sociability which once allowed the landed families and merchant bankers and politicians of Georgian England to hold or gain or expand their power and wealth and now allows young men and women to acquire the styles and opinions of the strangely fluid ruling classes of the 20th and 21st centuries—to be a bit over-simplistic. For the most part, a liberal education has not been some sort of solitary, scholarly search for truth, partly because most in the West prior to the 19th century believed truth was known and what was left to be discovered was, roughly, in the nature of the accidental as understood by philosophers. We supposedly had the rules of Creation and had only to play the game out.
By the eighteenth century, a liberal arts education in England had came to mean the socialization of the young men from the ruling classes of English society; I think this was partly true in the North American colonies but tempered by the need of even landed Virginian gentlemen to scramble for a living. Was that shaping of an English or American gentleman truly the formation of a free man? We should remember always what even the most liberal advocates of liberal arts often seem to forget, what Aristotle learned in a sense as his young student, Prince Alexander of Macedonia, went off to a short life as a brutal and exploitive conqueror: you might be able to teach someone how to make good bricks, you might be able to teach a willing student how to make an aesthetically pleasing and sturdy dining-room table, you might even be able to teach the law well enough for a student to go on to worthwhile work in helping to settle marriage or real estate problems… But you can’t teach someone to be wise or free. This means you also can’t teach someone to be creative, to find good solutions to serious problems.
Even those with the capacity for wisdom or freedom have to learn how to live a good life, have to learn enough about created being and its Creator and have to learn how to form the proper relationships to their Creator and to that being including human being both individual and communal. I think it better on the whole to speak of the shaping of a human being by his active and proper responses to created being, concrete and abstract, and to the Creator. I’ve written much on that viewpoint in the past and I’ll try to summarize my thoughts in Part 3. (I’ll ignore the complication that stable societies, which we no longer have in the West, can prosper with large ruling classes dominated by those who don’t have the ability or inclination for true learning, self-started and self-directed learning though always best done with guidance from a master of learning.)
There is much which is interesting and stimulating in Kagan’s essay. There is much that tells us about the changes over time of the `traditions’ of education in the liberal arts. I will note a more recent tradition, one championed by John Henry Newman and one I tend to follow in my personal goals as I try to learn much about Creation and understand that in some depth.
Liberal education must become general education, including languages, literature, history, and the natural sciences. In the words of one writer, “A man of the highest education ought to know something of everything, and everything of something.”
Some even seemed to aim for the stars:
The answer of some was “universal knowledge.” They urged a broadening of the field of learning to include all that was known and an attempt to synthesize and integrate the information collected by discovering the philosophical principles that underlay it all. As one Victorian put it, “The summit of a liberal education … is Philosophy—meaning by Philosophy the sustained effort … to frame a complete and reasoned synthesis of the facts of the universe.”
But, as Kagan tells us with perhaps a little sadness, “Newman was an intellectual, an academic, and an Aristotelian and he defended the ancient idea of the value of learning and knowledge for their own sake at a time when the tide was running against it, as it usually does.” And a seemingly serious problem arose:
In the last decades of the century, Newman’s idea of knowledge for its own sake and the whole concept of universal knowledge for the purpose of philosophical understanding were swept away by a great tidal wave from across the channel, whose chief source was Germany. All the educational ideas we had considered to this point had this in common: They regarded knowledge as something that existed already. There was little thought of discovering anything true that had not previously been known.
From the viewpoint of those who loved the universities and the established fields of knowledge, most strongly—established truths, all hell had broken loose, though I found myself in this seeming hell about 25 or 30 years ago and after a disturbing few years began to enjoy it greatly. More on that in Part 3.
Kagan finishes his essay by an assessment of the goals of a liberal arts education as defined in the modern world, concluding it to be very close to the socializing goals of liberal arts education in eighteenth century England, the setting which so frustrated Adam Smith who sought a serious education and decided to skip the worthless formal education and to spend his time educating himself by way of an unscrupulously opportunistic exploitation of the libraries of Oxford. Adam Smith became a solitary pirate of sorts in the midst of those who went on to threw away so many opportunities to forge an earlier and greater Commonwealth.
Kagan provides my cue when he writes: “The search for general, universal knowledge and for the philosophical principles on which it may be based has long since been abandoned. In truth, I think it never had much hope or support.” We need thinkers with the courage and faith and wide knowledge to make sense of spacetime and matter and the moral complexities of human communities grown immensely larger and more complex than anything considered in the existing traditions of the West. We need to make sense of human nature in light of modern history and of evolutionary theory and genetics.
In Part 3, I’ll try to give a comprehensive summary of what I’ve done in trying to provide a plausible worldview, a generally disparaged term, which is really a Creation-view, an understanding of life, the universe, and all created being.