Mark Van Doren: Liberal Education. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965 [1943].
By the mid-1940s, Mark Van Doren had already worked with Mortimer J. Adler to establish the ‘Great Books’ curriculum at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where students would study Western classics together, from the ancients as freshmen to the modern Europeans and Americans as seniors, while picking up the rudiments of Greek and French along the way. Unlike previous forms of liberal education in the West, St. John’s offered neither a religious nor a civic education, although it fostered no animosity towards either religion or politics. Van Doren was a poet (Adler thought of himself as a philosopher), having indeed won the Pulitzer Prize for a book of poems published a few years before the appearance of Liberal Education. By then, he had moved to the English department at Columbia.
For him, then, “liberal education is intellectual education,” not so much the formation of character. At the same time, he resists the contemporary esteem for a purely scientific and technical education as illiberal. His reservations about science are nothing new, he rightly observes: “Science is not the only problem, yet it is a huge one, and”—likely thinking of the controversial ‘pre-Socratics’—it “always was.” “There has never been a time in Western thought when science was not a problem.” Today, the problem with the study of science to the exclusion or diminution of all else is that such study is illiberal. Although he never mentions them, the rulers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia both claimed science as the preeminent justification for their regimes, even if in both instances they upheld pseudo-science along with some of the real thing.
In contrast with these modern tyrannies, the modern liberal or free regime seeks science in its original sense: knowledge. It seeks that knowledge, implying that it doesn’t have it, or at least does not have it in full. “The best time for a free society is the time when everybody believes it makes a difference what he thinks and knows; and the accent should be at last on knows.” Genuinely liberal education “prepares the mind to search” for knowledge. Such knowledge will enjoy precision, including the precision of poetry. As at St. John’s, “the way to produce individual intellects is to teach all students the same things, and of course the best things.” It is fair to call Van Doren a liberal educator in the beam of the Enlightenment.
If philosophy begins with wonder, education and discussions of education begin with a certain dissatisfaction with education. “It is impossible to discover a man who believes that the right things were done to his mind.” The dissatisfaction typical of those who think about education today is the danger of its “readiness to risk its dignity in a rush to keep up with events, to serve mankind in a low way which will sacrifice respect” for the thinkers of the past. Education in the name of ‘relevance’—the term would only come into vogue 25 years later—can “easily prove so useful as to earn contempt.” Although (as Van Doren generously allows) “all educators are well-intentioned,” “few of them reflect upon their intentions.” They do not adequately know themselves. To make utility the core of education is to assume you know what is useful. But if education arises from the desire to know it must be “humble at the center.”
Reflecting upon his intentions, and upon utility, the educator ought to see that “the one intolerable thing in education is the absence of intellectual design,” any overlooking of what education is useful for. “Nothing so big can long remain meaningless,” mindlessly utilitarian, thoughtlessly pragmatic. Echoing John Dewey (with perhaps a touch of irony), Van Doren asserts that “like democracy,” education “can be saved only by being increased.” If a man is honest, “nobody today thinks he has enough of it,” as he “does not find in himself a reasonably deep and clear feeling about the bearings upon one another, and upon his own mind, of three things, to name no more: art, science, and religion.” He doesn’t find that reasonable feeling because “he has never been at the center from which these radiate—if there is a center.” Perhaps confident in his knowledge of physics, he suspects he does not know metaphysics. “His education so far has been one-sided: mostly mathematical, mostly literary, or mostly something else.” Van Doren liberally admits that his own education has been literary, one that enables him to read Shakespeare but not Newton. And considering Shakespeare’s peers, “some of them are Greek to me.”
These limitations granted, who is “the educated person”? He is, in one sense, happy, happiness being not a mood but “the possession of [one’s] own powers,” not suffering “the bewilderment of one who suspects he has missed the main thing.” Newton, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, often unhappy in mood, at least did not suffer that torment. “Trust no philosopher who does not relish his existence and his thoughts.” A philosopher may be politic; he may be political. But he never takes the tone of a teacher “who asks the student to smile for the last time before he offers himself as a sacrifice to society,” to what a later generation would call ‘social justice.’ A real educator “is under no illusion that campaigns against inequality will mean the disappearance of injury among men.” At least as of 1943, despite “all our present shallowness of thought about the matter, we do still recognize that man’s distinguishing feature is his inability to know himself.”
Beginning to know oneself, “to find peace” on the soul’s terrain, sparks a new war, “the war of understanding.” William James, that pragmatist and firm opponent of one kind of war, found in this kind of war a feature of human nature itself. To know oneself is to know oneself as a sort of warrior, a warrior-spirit in the sense of one that “strain[s] to comprehend what he contains, straining even to contain it”—it being “bigger than he is.” Not the materialist, James, but the Christian, Pascal, says it best: “We must love a being who is in us, and is not ourselves.” This ‘it’ “is not an animal.” It “goes by many names, serves under many metaphors” (although not, it must be remarked, for Pascal, who knew the Holy Spirit when he met Him). “Whatever it is, its authority is huge, and one who has heard it speak will never be complacent again.” We both inherit ‘it’ as part of our human nature, and we seek it as “something into which we are educated.” Man is the being who is both ignorant and conscious of his ignorance, neither angel nor beast. He “has a strange difficulty: he does not know what to be.” Or, as Pascal puts it, to deny, to believe, and to doubt well are what humans do, because they are what they are, not any other thing.
Given the nature all men share, “no human being should miss the education proper to human being.” Doubtless nursing one or more old wounds, Van Doren contends that “educators, like magazine editors, persistently underrate the people,” but as for himself he insists that “what was once for a few must now be for the many” and, even more optimistically, there must be no “sacrifice of quality to quantity.” The ancients were right to hold that liberal education “is the education of a free man” and that “the free man is one who is worthy of a liberal education”; what remains to be discovered is “how many men are capable of freedom.” What was once the province of the young gentleman, “nature is prodigal” in its gifts, more prodigal than societies have been. “Liberal education in the modern world”—democratic, enlightened—must “work to make the aristocrat, the man of grace, the person, as numerous as fate allows,” to make “the last citizen…as free to become a prince and a philosopher as his powers permit.” Glancing at Aristotle, Van Doren avers, “the only slaves in our society ought to be its machines.”
Not the rare philosopher-king but the common citizen-philosopher? In democratic regimes, philosophy has aroused suspicion. “Sufficient wisdom sometimes seems almost esoteric, an accomplishment of genius which the mass is bound to find unintelligible, no surface difference appearing between the the subtlety of the philosopher and the caprice of the tyrants.” As for the philosopher’s part, “Socrates supposed that philosophers would be useless only in a democracy, where he assumed they would not be heard.” Van Doren replies that the answer to the question of “the few and the many” begins by admitting that all men will not “be the best men” but in taking care that “all men should be as good as possible,” inasmuch as “the higher the average the safer the state.” The pyramid keeps its apex and its base; it “will have symmetry only if the same attempt is made with every person,” “to produce in him the utmost of his humanity” by giving him “as much liberal education as he can take,” even if “he is in a hurry to become something less than a man”—say, a business-man rather than a leisure-man.
Against Dewey, Van Doren maintains that “there is no such thing as education for democracy,” since “education is either good or bad,” whatever the regime. “The best education makes the best men; and they will be none too good for democracy.” Like Dewey, however, he insists that “the best man will make the best citizen,” that democracy’s “only authority is reason,” and that the best men, the most rational men, the most philosophic men, can become the most eminent citizens. This is true because the life of reasoning, the life of the mind, is the farthest thing from both the “fear and obedience” society may “command” and also from the coldness of calculation. “Love or friendship,” which cannot be forced, ‘which are irreducibly personal,” develop “in places to which politics as most conceive it has no access.” “Yet they are the foundation of good politics” and “what education wishes to perfect.” Liberal education is indeed intellectual education, but the intellect loves, reason guides the most refined eros, the one that seeks knowledge, thought free of contradiction. “A congressman recently recommended that American youth be ‘taught to think internationally.’ It would be still better to teach them how to think.” Otherwise, “he is no longer at home in the republic of the mind, where…thought is free and only merit makes one eminent.” In that republic, he brings the democratic republic to the bar of “good or bad, right or wrong, true or false.” “These are personal things,” things “of man rather than of society,” bringing himself closer to fully human personality. Whereas “in politics we cultivate little areas of freedom where we can live in isolation from the wilderness of compulsion,” in “the large area of freedom,” in the life of the mind, we breathe better air. “An individual, thinking the best thoughts of which he is capable, and mastering the human discipline without jealousy for his own rule, becomes more of himself than he was before.”
In his optimism, Van Doren goes so far as to give self-surpassing self-fulfillment a Nietzschean twist. In an aristocracy, some men ought to surpass other men more than the other men surpass children; in a democracy, “all men surpass themselves, putting behind them childish things.” Such a democracy “will not deny its inferiority to persons”; indeed, “the superiority of its persons is its only strength.” “To say as much is to say that democracy lives dangerously.”
In his fourth, central chapter, Van Doren addresses the principal question for liberal education in his time and place, the question of the status of science. “A liberal education is more than a classical education, more than an education in English literature, more than an education in what is called ‘the humanities,’ and more than a training in the moral virtues.” And even these components of liberal education have atrophied in today’s schools, as, for example, classical literature has been studied as language, yielding “hatred of Greek and Latin” on the one hand, estheticism or the love of linguistic beauty simply, on the other. But “the great writers have not read greatly”—that is, very widely. They have read a few things carefully, and those things consider “the themes of good and evil, God and man, true and false, large and small, the same and the different.” Teachers should not be expected to be great thinkers; they should be expected to direct their students toward such thinkers. Inasmuch as “the young are incorrigibly moral,” tending toward the priggish not the thoughtful, a principal task of teaching is to get them away from that.
In 1943 as decades later, although in different ways, “professors of English behave as though they would like to explain literature away”—then by reducing it to ‘history,’ later by reducing it to ‘race, class, and gender.” “If all students of English were set to studying Shakespeare, who is so much the greatest of English writers that this might be no more than simply sensible, the result could be, in the first place, a generation of teachers who knew their business,” and in second place “a striking advance in our knowledge of Shakespeare.” (“There are no signs at the moment that such a project would be considered anything but insane.”)
Knowledge, then. Here is where science comes in. “Science is knowledge, and knowledge cannot be inhumane,” as it is what the human being’s rational love and friendship aims at. By itself, “humanism was never good enough,” having taken “too thin a view of man.” To attain both the knowledge of the science and the knowledge of the humanities requires the moral virtues, making “a pupil studious rather than merely curious” by making his love of knowledge persistent and steady. Curiosity that gives up too soon becomes “what Socrates called misology,” hatred of reason, hatred of the way to knowing. Yes, “the educated person is gentle, but he is at the same time a tough spirit,” one who knows by his studies that life is hard, “for that is what he has been taught it will be.” Moral virtue can’t be taught, yet the mind can be prepared to cultivate it. “Life for him is hard because he must always think about it, and thinking is hard” and life gives one a lot to think about, “bristling with decisions which fill his days with crisis and color them with possible tragedy.” Here tragedy may not begin but the path may lead to it. Like Socrates (if unlikely altogether like him), “he must be prepared…for resistance in the world to what he represents.” In a democracy, in the regime governed by popularity, “the thinking man is not readily popular,” as his “disinterested criticism is disturbing,” a threat to the peace of ‘the many.’ In this chapter, then, Van Doren moderates his optimism with a sobriety learned from Plato and (some will be surprised) Nietzsche.
Liberal education is knowledge of, among other things, certain arts—the “liberal arts.” These have long been counted as seven: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Van Doren would redefine these as reading—the operation of particular things in discourse; writing—the signifying of some particular things through others; and thinking—the relation of all things to universals. This more capacious enumeration encompasses the original seven but adds forms of science and mathematics unmentioned in them while extending the ‘verbal’ arts to the things the philosopher’s logic discovers and rejects and to the things poets may discern beyond rhetoric.
Insofar as liberal education and educators need institutions to support them, the college has proven the most serviceable such institution. Here Van Doren takes up history and in so doing unfortunately descends into historicism. “The American college today is descended in a direct line from the seventeenth century college which prepared so many persons for the ministry.” It no longer does so. Hence, he evidently supposes, the college is “one way in which the deeper spirit of the time received expression.” The spirit of this time is “secularized to the root” and moreover “busily occupied with details of trade, profession, an technique.” But is that spirit deep? Yes, but “it must be deep indeed, for few can define it.” The spirit of this time is what the college of this time ought to search for. “The ancient obligation of the college is to express, and to that extent to be, a living principle.” Unsurprisingly, Van Doren finds this in the importation of “the European university” to America, with its “graduate or professional education” and (as he apparently does not see) its variety of Hegelianisms. Colleges have adapted to the university system by offering not a core of courses—easier to do when it inculcated religious truths—but ‘electives,’ courses of study that vary according to the several professions students now aspire to prepare themselves to enter.
This being so, “what should be studied, in what order?” Most urgently, what can be done to make the field of knowledge whole again, to re-associate “humanism and science,” to recover “the liberal strategy” of education. Yes, “the curriculum was now completely flexible, but it had no joints,” open but “it did not know what to contain.” Liberal education (in Hegelian language) has been rendered “incapable of its own synthesis,” leaving that to the confused student to his own devices.
Against this, a “wisely narrow” approach is needed. “Studies have their own natural joints, their relations to one another of sequence and of difficulty; the cutting up should then be done by persons with a kind of surgical knowledge” and more, a “philosophical” knowledge. The difficulty is that philosophy itself “is something that one department teaches, just as religion is encountered only in parochial schools.” “We shall refuse to believe in the seriousness of curriculum makers until we hear that they have decided, in the interests of philosophy, not to leave departments of philosophy in being.” Philosophizing needs to pervade the college, especially the spirit of the faculty that sets the curriculum and (dare one say it) the spirit of the ‘administrators’ who run the place.
If Van Doren is a historicist, he is a ‘right-Hegelian,’ not a ‘left-Hegelian’ of either the liberal-progressive or Marxist stripes. He looks to the tradition of the West in defining liberal education, albeit a tradition that “heaves with controversies and unanswered questions,” a tradition which in principle has culminated in, but in practice may well never culminate in, Hegel’s grand synthesis of a comprehensive science of knowledge in a world state because “at no time is the world populated by competent philosophers,” and consequently no thoroughly ‘enlightened’ political order is possible. At best, the liberal arts learned by the liberally educated man may bring him to “an artistry in difference,” that modest capacity to exercise the principle of non-contradiction in the ability to perceive distinctions. Democratic regimes too easily lose themselves in a thoughtless egalitarianism, as “ordinary persons…expect others to be like themselves.” By finding the joints that connect the liberal arts while maintaining the distinctions among the bones, teachers in liberal arts colleges can begin to teach their students to discern the extraordinary, and to see the connections between it and the ordinary.
But in the meantime, what to do with the physical sciences, “which are a problem for the educator because they do their work so well,” outpacing the humanities? “The way to catch up with them is not to sermonize against their inhumanity,” especially since “the liberal arts survive more intact in their laboratories than elsewhere in education today.” Unlike the art-for-art’s-sake relativists in the humanities, scientists persist in seeking the truth. They deploy their arts, their ‘techniques,’ to observe, classify, deduce, verify, and predict. Scientific truth may not be the whole truth, but it’s part of it, and scientists haven’t given up their quest for it.
If the scientist now tends to assume that his understanding of the truth is the only one, it is because he has “lacked thoughtful partners in the enterprise of intellect” for a long time. “He has used philosophy because he could not do without it, but the specimens available to him were those that lingered by inertia in his mind.” As a result, when he ventures outside his ‘discipline’ he inclines to “dogmatism.” “The modern distinction between science and philosophy has led to the intellectual demotion of philosophy and the impoverishment of science. Looking at his scientistic contemporaries, Socrates thought judged that “when the good is known less well than things, then the value even of things is missed.” What is needed is a philosophy of science that does not exclude consideration of what science is good for. While “the college student will not discover this, or contribute to its discovery…no time is too early to learn that the problem exists.”
What about religion, science’s supposed rival for human attachment? Here Van Doren, who came from a family of atheists, has less to say, although what he does say is suggestive. He wisely recommends Pascal’s Pensées (“written with sharp eyes by a great mathematician”) and he acknowledges that “most of our terms for man when we praise him are inherited from languages that traced his highest nature to the gods.” He quite sensibly observes that liberal education has never generated a religion, “and so, if one is needed now, liberal education will not be its source.” “Liberal education is occupied with the nature of things, and chiefly with the nature of man,” and evidently not, in his view, with the revelation of things or the ‘nature’ of ‘the gods.’ Liberal education cultivates the ‘unaided’ human intellect, not spirituality. Van Doren wants it to attend to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, not so much to God Himself.
What, then, of the evident tension between Van Doren’s historicism and his esteem for nature? “The medium of liberal education is that portion of the past which is always present.” If so, his talk of the ‘spirit of the times’ as the spirit of liberal arts colleges must be heavily qualified. And he does qualify it, remarking on the spirit of his own time as one in which “literary and philosophical careers atrophy” and “intellectual movements are…short-lived and self-defeating.” He ascribes this fault to Bacon’s bifurcation of truth—truth in things and truth in words—and to Descartes’s abandonment of literary studies for what he called the great book of the world. “The poet of an older time who assumed that he could know as much as any man—and half a dozen of his species did—exists no longer, while science more and more noticeably suffers from the all but universal conviction that it alone can deal with reality,” even as “the reality it finds is deficient in fancy and even in logic.” Meanwhile, “the poet who ignores or abuses his intellect seems not to know, though the rest of the world does, that his imagination has grown feeble.”
If scientists, philosophers, and poets need to keep an eye on one another in order to sharpen their minds and imaginations, how does a teacher, a liberal educator, stay sharp? By learning “by teaching.” “If Socrates was the perfect teacher, the reason is that he was the perfect student.” (If Jesus was the perfect teacher, the reason is that He was God. Socrates was then the perfect human teacher, and even Jesus was a perfect student inasmuch as He was the Son of God, who really did know everything.) The Sophists Socrates questioned were mere lecturers; they did not impress in dialogue. A real teacher asks “real questions”; “when we want answers no matter what the source, be it ourselves or others, be it old or young, be it one in authority or the most insignificant authorities,” only then do we stand to learn something. “The good teacher is a man whose conversation is never finished, partly because it is about real things and so cannot be finished, but partly because there is always a new audience, which itself takes part.” Many are called teachers but too few choose themselves as teachers. “The teacher who is not a liberal artist may indoctrinate or charm, but he will not teach.” The liberal educator invites his students on an erotic quest quite different from those they are inclined to undertake. “It is the love of truth that makes men free in the common light of day.”
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