The tradition of the West is
embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the
dawn of history and that continues to the present day.
Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other
respects, no civilization is like that of the West in
this respect. No other civilization can claim that its
defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No
dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that
of the West in the number of great works of the mind
that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward
which Western society moves is the Civilization of the
Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the
spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos.
Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak
his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The
exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the
realization of the potentialities of the race.
At a time when the West is most
often represented by its friends as the source of that
technology for which the whole world yearns and by its
enemies as the fountainhead of selfishness and greed, it
is worth remarking that, though both elements can be
found in the great conversation, the Western ideal is
not one or the other strand in the conversation, but the
conversation itself. It would be and exaggeration to say
that Western civilization means these books. The
exaggeration would lie in the omission of the plastic
arts and music, which have quite as important a part in
Western civilization as the great productions included
in this set. But to the extent to which books can
present the idea of a civilization, the idea of Western
civilization is here presented.
These books are the means of
understanding our society and ourselves. They contain
the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it.
There is no comparable repository of our tradition. To
put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has
characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the
books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a
few generations. On the other hand, the revival of
interest in these books from time to time throughout
history has provided the West with new drive and
creativeness. Great Books have salvaged, preserved, and
transmitted the tradition on many occasions similar to
our own.
The books contain not merely
the tradition, but also the great exponents of the
tradition. Their writings are models of the fine and
liberal arts. They hold before us what Whitehead called
“‘the habitual vision of greatness.” These books have
endured because men in every era have been lifted beyond
themselves by the inspiration of their example, Sir
Richard Livingstone said: “We are tied down, all our
days and for the greater part of our days, to the
commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers,
great literature helps. In their company we are still in
the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world
transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and
genius. And some of their vision becomes our own.”
Until very recently these books
have been central in education in the West. They were
the principal instrument of liberal education, the
education that men acquired as an end in itself, for no
other purpose than that it would help them to be men, to
lead human lives, and better lives than they would
otherwise be able to lead.
The aim of liberal education is
human excellence, both private and public (for man is a
political animal). Its object is the excellence of man
as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not
as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the
means to it. For this reason it is the education of free
men. Other types of education or training treat men as
means to some other end, or are at best concerned with
the means of life, with earning a living, and not with
its ends.
The substance of liberal
education appears to consist in the recognition of basic
problems, in knowledge of distinctions and
interrelations in subject matter, and in the
comprehension of ideas.
Liberal education seeks to
clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in
which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a
grasp of the methods by which solutions can be reached
and the formulation of standards for testing solutions
proposed. The liberally educated man understands, for
example, the relation between the problem of the
immortality of the soul and the problem of the best form
of government; he understands that the one problem
cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and
that the test that he will have to bring to bear upon
solutions proposed differs from one problem to the
other.
The liberally educated man
understands, by understanding the distinctions and
interrelations of the basic fields of subject matter,
the differences and connections between poetry and
history, science and philosophy, theoretical and
practical science; he understands that the same methods
cannot be applied in all these fields; he knows the
methods appropriate to each.
The liberally educated man
comprehends the ideas that are relevant to the basic
problems and that operate in the basic fields of subject
matter. He knows what is meant by soul. State, God,
beauty, and by the other terms that are basic to the
insights that these ideas, singly or in combination,
provide concerning human experience.
The liberally educated man has
a mind that can operate well in all fields. He may be a
specialist in one field. But he can understand anything
important that is said in any field and can see and use
the light that it shed upon his own. The liberally
educated man is at home in the world of ideas and in the
world or practical affairs, too, because he understands
the relation of the two. He may not be at home in the
world of practical affairs in the sense of liking the
life he finds about him; but he will be at home in that
world in the sense that he understands it. He may even
derive from his liberal education some conception of the
difference between a bad world and a good one and some
notion of the ways in which one might be turned onto the
other.
The method of liberal education
is the liberal arts, and the result of liberal education
is discipline in those arts. The liberal artist learns
to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He
learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter,
quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and
exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know
it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we
know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well
or badly, all the time every day. As we should
understand the tradition as well as we can in order to
understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal
artists as we can in order to become as fully human as
we can.
The liberal arts are not merely
indispensable; they are unavoidable, Nobody can decide
for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The
only question open to him is whether he will be an
ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach
the highest point he is capable of attaining. The
question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal
artist or a good one.
The tradition of the West in
education is the tradition of the liberal arts. Until
very recently nobody took seriously the suggestion that
there could be any other ideal. The educational ideas of
John Locke, for example, which were directed to the
preparation of the pupil to fit conveniently into the
social and economic environment in which he found
himself, made no impression on Locke’s contemporaries.
And so it will be found that other voices raised in
criticism of liberal education fell upon deaf ears until
about a half-century ago.
This Western devotion to the
liberal arts and liberal education must have been
largely responsible for the emergence of democracy as an
ideal. The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for
full human development, and, since the liberal arts are
the basic means of such development, devotion to
democracy naturally results from devotion to them. On
the other hand, if acquisition of the liberal arts is an
intrinsic part of human dignity, then the democratic
ideal demands that we should strive to see to it that
all have the opportunity to attain to the fullest
measure of the liberal arts that is possible to each.
The present crisis in the world
has been precipitated by the vision of the range of
practical and productive art offered by the West. All
over the world men are on the move, expressing their
determination to share in the technology in which the
West has excelled. This movement is one of the most
spectacular in history, and everybody is agreed upon one
thing about it: we do not know how to deal with it. It
would be tragic if in our preoccupation with the crisis
we failed to hold up as a thing of value for all the
world, even as that which might show us a way in which
to deal with the crisis, our vision of the best that the
West has to offer. That vision is the range of the
liberal arts and liberal education. Our determination
about the distribution of the fullest measure of these
arts and this education will measure our loyalty to the
best in our own past and our total service to the future
of the world.
The great books were written by
the greatest liberal artists. They exhibit the range of
the liberal arts. The authors were also the greatest
teachers. They taught one another. They taught all
previous generations, up to a few years ago. The
question is whether they can teach us.
Robert M. Hutchings |