LiberalArtsOnline Volume 2, Number 1
January 2002
by John Agresto
Past President
St. John's College
Section I -- The Liberal Arts: You Worse Than Useless Thing
When students discuss the liberal arts, they often mean two things: that their courses are not professional, and that their studies are in a wide array of fields. The liberal arts stand apart both from narrowness and from training.
The liberal arts as the opposite of professional or vocational training is an old and venerable understanding. Ancient theorists, perhaps too blunt for our tastes, called one type of education liberal, and the other servile. The servile arts were skills learned for the sake of the doing and for the benefit of others more than oneself.
But free men-gentlemen-could learn skills whose only object was in the learning itself. Aristotle said the liberal arts "are those which tend to enjoyment, where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the activity itself."
Now it may be that the liberal arts satisfy some private need, some inner and personal desire. Men and women have a capacity to wonder and to question, which only knowing can satisfy. In a sense, the satisfaction is a kind of usefulness that seems to begin and end with us. But that itself is part of the problem. Why, to be blunt, should any public-spirited citizen support the liberal arts, which seem merely to delight the possessor, rather than the other arts, which are of value, of service, to so many more?
But the position of the liberal arts vis a vis society may be even more problematic than that. Let me offer another useful definition of the liberal arts: The liberal arts are the method by which we seek to discover the truth about the most important matters of human life through reason and reflection.
Nonetheless, it seems the more important the question is for life, the greater likelihood the answer is already publicly given. If I can reduce it, society already has the answers to the most basic questions through three media: Priests, Poets, and Parents. Priests: "Our Gods told you how to live." Poets: "Our story, our culture, our literature tells us the way." Parents: "We do it this way because it is our way. It is the way our parents, and their parents, did it. Why would you question them?"
But the liberal arts seek to discover what really is true, as opposed to what people say is true. In doing so the liberal arts stand in some real tension to the public and its comfortable views. Rather than do what citizens naturally hope for from education -- namely, that all their questions will be answered -- the liberal arts seem to offer the exact opposite - that all their answers will be questioned. The liberal arts seem happy to question, even rupture, the bonds of any society as they shrug in answer to the question "What is true and how shall we implement it?" It was something like this that led Hobbes to proclaim that the universities are to our country what the wooden horse was to the Trojans. Now, how useful is that?
Find the answer online: "Section II-- Wherein the Liberal Arts Are Redeemed, in Part" is available on our web site at http://www.wabash.edu/cila/home.cfm?news_id=1437
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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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