LiberalArtsOnline Volume 1, Number 11
November 2001
by Marshall Gregory
Harry Ice Professor of English, Liberal Education, and Pedagogy
Butler University
I believe that literary study and study of the arts in general perform powerfully in helping us achieve the underlying aim of all liberal education: the development of fundamental and distinctive human capacities.
In particular, the arts, especially literary study, teach us some kinds of knowledge about human possibilities, human motives, human types, and potential human destinies that cannot be taught as vividly or powerfully, and probably not at all, by any other form of learning. And not just the art form as an abstraction, but specific works of art experienced in all of their rich detail and concreteness. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" chorale in the ninth symphony, for example, is not about joy--it is a direct expression of joy, and not just of any kind of joy. It is a direct expression of the joy of creation, brotherhood, sisterhood, humanity, and social justice imagined on a cosmic scale.
But notice that this statement does not make you feel what the chorale itself makes you feel. There is no way to acquire this knowledge other than confronting the work of art itself. Experience of Beethoven's music is the path to the knowledge the music conveys, but it is not the knowledge itself. One can listen without taking the path, without acquiring the knowledge.
The case for art as a way of knowing--and for certain forms of knowing as contributing to certain forms of personal development--is even easier to make when it comes to literature, particularly narratives. Telling stories about who we have been connects us to the past both individually and socially; telling stories about what we might be connects us to the worlds of possibility; telling stories about what we are doing clarifies our motives and establishes our identities. In short, telling stories is our most enduring, comprehensive, and elemental way of organizing our knowledge about the world.
Human beings have many other ways of organizing their knowledge besides telling stories, ways that are reflected and embodied in other disciplines besides English. History, philosophy, religion, and science, for example, all help human beings organize and interpret their experience of the world. But story-telling is even more fundamental--not more important, but more fundamental in the sense of comprehensive or primordial--than these, partly because stories are the basic "stuff" in which many of these other disciplines find their roots. At the very least, stories provide an important vehicle for the views that these other perspectives wish to advance. (Notice how the theory of evolution quickly becomes the story of evolution--is it more easily remembered as theory or as story?)
Stories also are fundamental to human development, both personally and socially. One can imagine a functional human being--not a well-educated one, but nevertheless functional--who knows little or nothing of history, philosophy, science, or religion, but one cannot imagine a human being even being a human being without having been reared among other human beings, that is, without having been reared inside a culture. And one cannot imagine a culture apart from the stories that are both the matrix of culture and the nursery of the human soul.
We don't just come into our humanity because we are programmed to do so. We develop individually and socially by negotiating the terms and means and ends of being human--in addition to learning the arts and skills of being human--with other people, with traditions of inquiry, with customs, with modes of conduct, with religious beliefs and systems, with science, with nature, and, finally, with art, which conveys to us essential kinds of knowledge for understanding ourselves as specific instances of the general human condition. Such is the stuff of a liberal education.
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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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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.