By Dustin McNichol
In a well-written and provocative article, Chris Berger argues that the
liberal arts are suffering from a serious identity crisis and that
apologists who champion them are missing the point. We must therefore,
as Berger correctly points out, take a deeper look at what liberal arts
and education mean. However, Berger’s argument that the arts’ principal
goal is to cultivate the soul also follows an instrumental logic, and
again misses the point of what the liberal arts are, and what their
purpose is. In this article I propose to further discuss the state of
liberal arts and higher education, offering my own proposal(s) for
meaningful reforms.
We must first agree on what the “liberal arts” are. Berger
explains that they are a “branch” of education, but this is only
partially true and clouds our understanding of them in history, since
societies perceive and construct educational systems differently
throughout time. The Greek model, which stressed civic virtue, also
existed alongside geometry (which Plato was particularly fond of) and
mathematics; the arts and sciences were not “branches” of education,
they were education. This model reigned roughly until the
Enlightenment, when a relentless preoccupation with compartmentalizing
forms of knowledge began to displace the previous epistemological unity
which the Greeks favoured. In the nineteenth century, the ascendency of
Darwinian theory and the creation of “social science” disciplines marked
the end of the marriage of arts and sciences (to put it into
contemporary terms) as disciplines became increasingly specialized and
fractured. Only in more recent times have we begun to understand arts as
inherently distinct from the sciences.
Whether or not this is a problem or represents some sort of
“crisis” for liberal arts is another matter entirely. It is becoming
increasingly clear that our current strategies for defending our
vocations and forms of knowledge are not successful. Indeed, apologists
for the liberal arts ought not appeal to nostalgia, as Berger does,
since the Greek model only belonged to an elite and would continue to do
so until the Enlightenment, when ideas of citizenship became
increasingly universal and men of letters began to appear in groups
other than the clergy and political elites. Today’s universities, with
their ever-expanding armies of undergraduate, graduate, and
post-doctoral students in all disciplines, are in fact the exact
opposite of the Greek ideal. Indeed, a liberal arts education is now a
popular affair; more than ever, people are being introduced to our
common heritage of ideas, great thinkers, politicians, and events.
But even this optimistic understanding of the liberal arts
as “liberating” is only partial. The liberal arts are often looked upon
positively by apologists who are forgetting a more frightening, and
indeed disturbing truth: that throughout history, great thinkers trained
in the liberal arts have been complicit in humanity’s darkest moments
and events. To take an example, twentieth-century Europe, the (sometimes
still) so-called centre of humanistic and enlightened reflection at the
time, barbarically smashed itself to pieces during its first
half-century with the help of a great deal of highly-educated men and
women. The liberal arts bear great responsibility for the tragedies of
Europe’s twentieth century. This grim observation is simply to point out
that we cannot view the liberal arts nostalgically, or as meaning the
pursuit of “justice” as Berger argues. The darker reality of the liberal
arts means that justice cannot constitute its unifying principle; there
is no “golden age” when the arts were not captive to human desires,
temptations, and flaws. But its ambivalence offers us a clue as to our
predicament, since the liberal arts seems to not only signify thinking about humanity, but being human and participating fully in all of our successes and failures.
On what grounds, then, can the liberal arts be defended?
Widely defined, the liberal arts – a body of different humanistic forms
of knowledge – cannot be separated from their function; in other words,
what the liberal arts are is also what they do. More specifically, they ask questions. The act
of learning necessarily turns on the asking of questions and the
confrontation of our own ignorance; knowledge acquired, in turn,
provokes more questions. We must, then, see the liberal arts as centred
around the questioning of society, humanity, reality, history – anything
and everything that is human and that humanity interacts with. This is
not an end in itself but rather a process. To take an analogy from Plato
as Berger has done, Plato’s cave not only signifies a destination or
end goal (the leaving behind of ignorance) but also the process
of searching for light and truth, whatever that may be. The liberal
arts have always asked questions and sought answers, and will continue
to do so because the act of questioning is universally human. Here we
can find common ground for a robust defense of our function in
universities and in societies.
I do not mean that questioning and thinking in the liberal
arts refers uniquely to deconstructing and “understanding” our reality;
quite the opposite. We need to reach beyond truth towards what is
beautiful, human, imperfect, even contradictory. Nietzsche famously said
that he did philosophy “with a hammer”; indeed, a hammer can destroy
and tear down, but it is also used to construct, to create, to build. To
put it differently: asking “what is truth?” can end a conversation;
what it really does, however is create a new one. Questioning is what
the liberal arts are all about, from the ancient Greeks to the
postmodernists.
We need to change the conversation about liberal arts. This
cannot be done, as many believe, by finding a unifying principle such
as justice, or preserving some sort of traditional model for our
disciplines. We must continue to live in our society and engage with it
as previous thinkers, politicians, academics, and artists have done.
This website is an excellent example of the liberal arts in the
twenty-first century.
Changing the conversation about liberal arts means taking
the liberal arts’ timeless, universal, and central function – asking
questions – and applying it to today’s new forms of education. It means
creating new ways of seeing humanity. It means that university
professors can no longer ignore the massive changes that the Internet
and technology have wrought in our societies. It means that the question
of employment and “usefulness” of a B.A. must be dealt with seriously,
not simply ignored as “capitalistic” or besides the point. We must make
sure that the intrinsic value of questioning is not forgotten in the
deafening cacophony of media and popular discourse that insists that we
are in a crisis. We must not allow discursive nonsense that
disenfranchises our purpose as liberal arts graduates and
creative/critical thinkers go unanswered. The liberal arts still have
much work to do in this respect.
There is one final and much more important question that
should be considered seriously: is the “liberal arts crisis” real?
Perhaps the fact that we view our disciplines with such criticism, and
that we are on the agenda of many major universities, shows that we are
doing our jobs. Perhaps there is no crisis in liberal arts education
except for the one that we have created ourselves.
What are the “liberal arts”? Kudos to Chris Berger for questioning them – we should all continue to do so.
