Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education

Freedom is to Learn

N. Tubbs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137358912
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137358929
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book argues for a modern version of liberal arts education, exploring first principles within the divine comedy of educational logic. By reforming the three philosophies of metaphysics, nature and ethics upon which liberal arts education is based, Tubbs offers a profound transatlantic philosophical and educational challenge to the subject.

Part I

Introduction

Philosophers and orators: Discipline and freedom

The dualism in liberal arts between philosophy and rhetoric carries its own educational significance. Here I take as my guide Bruce Kimball’s book Orators and Philosophers. He presents the history of the artes liberales as the ‘story of a debate between orators and philosophers,’¹ which he says is carried by attitudes towards dialectic and rhetoric. In general terms, for the philosophers who are steeped in the rigour of dialectical reasoning, rhetoric is merely an appeal to ‘emotion, sensitivity, and predisposition in order to effect persuasion.’² The philosophers see rhetoric attending ‘more to devising persuasive techniques than to finding true arguments’³ while the orators see in philosophy an endless search for ‘that highest truth [which] is never attained.’⁴ To the orators, rhetoric is ‘the supreme art’⁵ that relies on dialectic for the logic of an argument, but has for itself the art of settling the ‘great and important questions’⁶ of public concern and significance. From Zeno this debate has achieved its own rhetorical flourish, characterised as between the open palm of interpretation and the closed fist of absolute or scientific knowledge. One of the aims of Kimball’s book is to show that some of the confusions which plague the recent history of American higher education are due to liberal education having Socrates, rather than Cicero, ‘as its paragon.’⁷

I will rehearse Kimball’s thesis in Part I now, by reading the history of liberal arts education according to the opposition between philosophy and rhetoric. With Zeno, I characterise philosophy as the closed fist because it deals with eternal and unchangeable truths, and rhetoric as the open palm of the changeable, of interpretation and of creativity. The closed fist of necessity is, at different times, the method of philosophy, the logic of the in-itself including truth and God, the first principle of the natural universe, the empiricism of science, the dialectic of scholasticism, the core curriculum, generalist education, teaching and the tradition of the Great Books. The open palm of freedom is, again at different times, the virtue of the liberally educated person, the logic of the for-itself including reflection and self-critique, the freedom of human culture, the creativity of oratory, the humanism of classical literature including reading, writing and emulating great characters from antiquity, the system of electives and specialist research and expertise.

In advance of the arguments made in Part II, I re-read this history as characterising the ambiguous relation between the disciplined and predetermined nature of a skill or principled practice – ars – and the freedom conveyed by liberalis: in sum, the contradiction carried in artes liberales. One can then re-read the relation between philosophy and rhetoric as a difficult relation which has its own kind of educational truth. I argue that the dualism of philosophy and rhetoric, of the closed fist of discipline and the open palm of freedom, is not just a dialectic between two elements. It is also the relation of two elements whose struggle against each other is its own educational logic. I concur with Kimball’s analysis that interpreters deny the ambiguities expressed in this work in the search for clarity and certainty. But I go further, and argue for preserving these ambiguities as having meaning in their own right and with having profound educational significance. I argue that it is the difficulties posed for a liberal arts education in the relation or work between philosophy and rhetoric that can be said to define liberal arts. If philosophy is the art or method of arriving at true knowledge, and rhetoric requires its imaginative and creative use for the good of society, seen in this way, liberal arts education exists in the contradiction between discipline and freedom.

It is with this in mind that in Part I, I survey a history of liberal arts education played out as the dualism between discipline (philosophy) and freedom (rhetoric), and in Part II, I retrieve a philosophy of education from within their relation. More specifically, in Part I the heavy hand of philosophical necessity appears as philosophy, harmony, the Prime Mover and logic (Chapter 1); doctrine, the encyclopaedic seven liberal arts, humanitas, theology, philosophy and discipline (Chapter 2); Aristotelian logic, dialectical scholastic method including in teaching, philosophy, the church, history and the university (Chapter 3); the state, philosophy, law, humanity, duty and the US-style faculty-led generalist classical curriculum (Chapter 4). Ranged against such necessity are various shapes of the open palm of freedom: rhetoric, virtue, sophism and language (Chapter 1); humanism, humanitas and faith informed by education (Chapter 2); humanism, the studia humanitatis, classical emulation of Latin and Greek, subjectivity, civics, freedom and education (Chapter 3); individuality, inwardness, aesthetics, humanism, growth, development, freedom, culture and the electives of a specialist type research-based higher education (Chapter 4). It is an obvious point that these divisions look forced in that they cross each other all the time. But that is the point. I want to illustrate how frail such separations are, and to illustrate how the educational concepts of liberal arts, paideia, humanism, rhetoric, Bildung and philosophy try to express just such difficult relations. From this survey of difficulty, focussed around the relation of the universal as the iron fist of speculative and scholastic necessity and freedom as the open palm of practical, humanistic rhetorical creativity, we find not the victory of the one over the other, but their sustained relation to each other. What emerges here are the conditions for a modern conception of liberal arts education and for a modern educational first principle.

1

Antiquity: Finding Virtue in Necessity

The virtue of harmony

In antiquity a first principle rests on both the logic of its own necessity and the necessity of its own logic. Together these are its logos. Aristotle’s Prime Mover is its own necessity because it has no condition of its own possibility beyond or outside itself. This necessity is the logic of its existence as a first principle. It is moved by itself, caused by itself, and therefore is a truth in-itself. It is entirely independent. In addition, being the first principle of itself, it is also the condition of the possibility of everything else – the universe and everything in it. All things can trace their own necessity back to the necessity of the self-sufficient first principle. Liberal arts education has its origin in the attempt to discover such first principles and does so by relating first principles to the intellectual, natural and social worlds.

The ancients define this logic of necessity as harmony and proportion.¹ In metaphysics this is truth, in physics this is nature and in the social world this is freedom. In each case the ancients make a virtue out of necessity. Harmony describes that which is at peace with itself because all the parts find their perfect place within the perfect whole. The ambivalence carried by this idea of harmony as a perfect totality will be felt in the tension between philosophy and rhetoric, in particular, and between discipline and freedom in general. We will follow this ambivalence through to Hutchins’ call in the 1930s for the miraculous metaphysical reconciliation of these tensions.

The logic of harmony was becoming evident to the ancients in the mathematical harmonies and proportions of the natural universe. They sought to apprehend every object, and every individual, as integral to an overall pattern, and to educate in ways which would reveal where in the totality one truly belonged. ‘The Greeks were perhaps the first to recognise that education means deliberately moulding human character in accordance with an ideal.’² To learn of one’s place in the totality of the intellectual, natural and social worlds is thereafter to lead a life of the highest virtue (areté). It is to be at one with the harmony of the universe, and therefore to be at one with its first principles.

That such an education and such a life are a struggle is highlighted by Aristotle in his Hymn to Hermias in praise of worth or virtue.

O worth! Stern taskmistress of humankind,

Life’s noblest prize:

O Virgin! For thy beauty’s sake

It is an envied lot in Hellas even to die

And suffer toils devouring, unassuaged . . .³

The Athenian idea of harmony is summed up by the philosophical proverb, credited to Solon (c. 638–558 BCE), ‘nothing in excess.’⁴ Excess is an imperfection compared to moderation and to the perfect harmony of the totality, which are, in turn, central to the education for virtue expressed by Thales dictum, know thyself.⁵

Pythagoras (c. 570–500 BCE)

Pythagoras is perhaps the first in the Western tradition explicitly to seek the first principle of harmony and perfection in educating mind, body and soul to the one end, or according to the one logic of necessity. His group of followers apparently followed a strict regime of diet and behaviour. He selected them ‘with great care, and subjected them to a long novitiate, in which silence, self-examination, and absolute obedience played a prominent part . . . Food, clothing, and exercise were all carefully regulated on hygienic and moral principles.’⁶

What Pythagoras gives to the West is the idea of a universe whose order and proportion were essentially mathematical. Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans (he often, rather dismissively, calls them ‘so-called’ Pythagoreans) were devoted to mathematics and saw number as the first principle of anything; ‘they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale or a number.’⁷ ‘It was this tendency, too, to construct universal patterns, which distinguished Greek music and mathematics from those earlier nations, so far as they are known to-day.’⁸ Music at this time is a broad concept and includes poetry. It is the form in which the tensions of man and gods are unfolded. If writing or the art of letters began with the attempt to record the oral tradition, then music could be deemed to be the source of all the liberal arts.⁹ Pythagoras may have related mathematical cosmology to his own disciplined life and that of his followers, but neither Plato nor Aristotle give him much credit as a philosopher. They refer to him as the founder of a disciplined way of life and as being knowledgeable of what happens to the soul after death.¹⁰

The most well-known story of Pythagoras is of him passing a blacksmith and deducing the octave from hearing hammers striking the handle.¹¹ The Tetraktys, seen as one of the founding metaphysical principles of the universe, reveals how the first four numbers not only add up to the perfect number ten but also contain within them the musical ratios of the octave, the fourth and the fifth. Regardless of what can or cannot be attributed to Pythagoras himself, in terms of the development thereafter of liberal arts education, he can be seen to be the person in whom the logos expresses itself as the desire to understand the first principles of the universe and to live in harmony with them.

After Pythagoras the idea of harmony, or of first principles, comes to be expressed in the experiences of metaphysics, physics and ethics. The Greek world after Pythagoras becomes reflective and calls upon the world traditionally understood to give an account of itself. Answering the call one finds the Sophists, the philosophers and the orators, each taking a different approach to the education deemed appropriate for the perfect emulation of the harmony and necessity of first principles, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Introduction
• Part III: The Song That Dialectic Sings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index