LiberalArtsOnline Volume 3, Number 7
May 2003
by John Churchill
Secretary, The Phi Beta Kappa Society, Washington, D.C.
One of the curiosities about liberal arts education is the inverse correlation, among its champions, between the intensity of their passion and their capacity to reach agreement with other advocates about its nature and content. Consensus may be possible on a core conception of liberal arts education, premised on the ideas that liberally educated persons know some things, care about some things, and can do some things. It is not accidental that these domains correspond roughly to a Platonic tripartite soul comprising a knowing intellect, a seat of the will and passions, and a generative, appetitive, and productive element.
First, liberally educated people know the ways of knowing things about the world, society, and the individual, and they know some of the things those ways of knowing provide. They know something of the histories and cultures of the world.
Second, liberally educated people care about questions of lasting significance.
Third, liberally educated people have skills of critical inquiry, deliberation, assessment of evidence, and management of multiple perspectives. They have capacities of coping with uncertainty and ambiguity.
And all these things admit consensus to a certain degree of specification. But pressed beyond a certain point, consensus vanishes and is replaced by passionate disagreement.
The Socratic search for an essence is likely to be our approach to liberal education. In the frustration of that search, we begin to fear we don't know what the term means. But if instances of liberal education are related by family resemblance rather than by possession of a shared essence, our disagreements may look less dire, and even hopeful.
Different conceptions of liberal education comprise many variants and resemble each other more or less. There is perhaps no characteristic shared by all versions; there is perhaps no version that possesses all the characteristics. But notions of liberal education cohere through their sharing of overlapping patterns of characteristics -- emphasizing knowledge, values, and capacities.
Of course there are borderline cases. But anyone who demands concepts sharply enough bounded to resolve all borderline cases has not reflected sufficiently on the vagueness of life.
So we are left with a potentially happy pluralism. We are given a range of agreement about a somewhat vague good, which all specify to their liking. You may not like my specification and I may not like yours, but all of us are free to advocate our own vision and to associate with allies. Each of us may contend that the others have missed the essence. If we are friends -- in the Aristotelian sense, interested in advancing each other's conceptions of the good -- we will argue in good spirit, with some common purpose.
Embracing pluralism does not imply indifference about further specifications. I would argue that it matters that certain disciplines, their content, methods, histories, and relations with other disciplines, are included in the "knowing" part of our conception of liberal education. If others disagree, I respect their views in the context of pluralism, but I must argue against them. My arguments will reflect a conception of human fulfillment. Similarly, it matters not only that liberally educated people care and do. What they care about, and how they care, matter. And it matters in detail what they can do. These things are to be argued in terms of the end that justifies them.
This conception of the liberal arts is an occasion for the exercise of the vision of the liberally educated person. Our arguments will be good if we bring to them knowledge, care, and skill. Our arguments will be happy if we are comfortable with disagreement, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The question "What is liberal arts education?" is not only about its subject matter -- it is an instance of it. That much is clear in detail.