A quick thought about a liberal arts education

Before the very idea of a liberal arts education becomes entirely subsumed in concerns about marketability and utility and the the equally horrid buzzwords of twenty-first century pedagogy, it's important to remember something that was distinctive about it once upon a time. 

Its goal was never the same thing as that of professional education. If you study business, you are doing so in order to go into business. And, that's right and good. 

But, that's not what studying literature or philosophy is in the first instance. Sure, lots of people get degrees in philosophy and then go on to study more philosophy in graduate school. That's fine. And, it satisfies to some small degree that hated and hateful question: "What are you going to do with a degree in that?"

No, the point of a liberal arts education, once upon a time, was the education of a person, a person who could go on to do a lot of different things. That person was a person who was going to be able to think liberally and philosophically and humanistically (and mathematically and logically and ...). (Such a person would be an intellectual in the best sense, not that we have any value for intellectuals these days.) That education involved a specialization, but as Oakeshott argued, that specialization was itself a training in the ability to delve into a subject, to explore more deeply, to dedicate oneself. It wasn't, or didn't have to be, a commitment to do this thing professionally or for the rest of one's life.

I don't know how many people recognize this as valuable anymore or how many realize the importance of leisure and non-utilitarian, non-box-checking approaches to the world to this pursuit, but I think we are paying a price and will continue paying a price in the polis for the loss of this idea of education.

The philosophers' ailment

Many philosophers have a nasty habit that is best thought of as a kind of illness. Maybe some therapy would help.

It isn't new. You can see it at least as far back as der Wiener Kreis, in the work of Carnap, sometimes Russell and Frege, even Wittgenstein. Dennett and the Churchlands exhibit it in philosophy of mind, and any number of ethicists seem to be suffering from it as they read studies in neuroscience and psychology and evolutionary biology.

A lot of us probably catch it in graduate school where it attaches either to a sense of inadequacy or admiration for people practicing other real disciplines. Its hold is strengthened in those conversations where social acquaintances tell us they can't figure out why anyone would be paid to shovel such meaningless bullshit and those moments when students ask us when they will ever use what we are talking about.

Its symptoms are such an overwhelming deference to scientists that one soon loses any sense of what exactly philosophy is supposed to be, as well as an inability to see that philosophy can ever do anything—has done anything in the two-and-a-half millennia it's been knocking around—except clear up a few minor confusions in the hallways of the people who really understand the universe and its inhabitants, the scientists. 

Ultimately, it leads to a kind of hard-on for science that the infected philosopher is no longer able to see any value that philosophy and its tools and methods and questions might offer, not least because she has given up the idea of value to science.

For example, here a philosopher decides that we cannot know whether literature has any value because the psychologists haven't done enough experiments yet, ignoring his own realization that literature might just be too complex to study by means of a set of laboratory experiments, and further ignoring that he has said nothing—as several commenters noted—about what makes literature good, or what moral improvement might be like, or whether we could even analyze morality by means of psychological experiments. He's too much in thrall of psychology to see that he has decided not to do philosophy or even be critical about the methods of the social sciences or question whether the right sorts of questions are being asked.

Of course, it must be sad to be engaged in a discipline that you think is no more than the handmaid of all the other—legitimate?—ones, but that's only half the problem. When students see this and when administrators see it, is it any wonder at all that philosophy gets shunted aside and cut with all the other humanities? When you give up on your own discipline, you shouldn't be amazed when others do as well.

A thought on public intellectuals

We should always be suspicious of the "public intellectual," the thinker or philosopher or critical thinker who enters too easily into the public sphere. For my own part—unless someone is willing to pay me to be one—I believe there is a necessary tension between being an intellectual and being a public figure. 

Of course, Socrates was a sort of public figure, but not a figure of influence in the government or in the shadows of government. He was as much a figure of ridicule and revulsion to the general public as a figure respected. Diogenes played much the same role. When Plato attempted to put himself in league with power, implementing his picture of the ideal state in Syracuse, it was a massive failure.

Montaigne undertook the great intellectual labors of the Essays not when he was still engaged in public life, but having closed himself up in his tower. Nietzsche is right to characterize the intellectual as a lover of the desert, as a kind of ascetic who has the humility of a mother nurturing her child, the child—or idea—for whom she lives. 

When the intellectual enters the public sphere too often you end up with Heidegger giving philosophical justifications for the great spiritual awakening he saw in Nazism, or the famous trahison de les clercs in which intellectual elites found themselves justifying the horrors of Stalinism. You get the theater of Christopher Hitchens—who thought himself a disciple of Orwell?—forgetting his own excoriation of Pinochet and welcoming the invasion of Iraq and helping to usher in a strengthened national security state. Speaking of Pinochet, you had the spectacle of Chicago-trained economists fomenting a revolution and welcoming a dictatorial state, all in the name of freedom. Of course, you also had Friedrich Hayek pronouncing that very state one of the freest he'd seen—no word of the thousands who were freed by being murdered. You have American intellectuals, both left and right, arguing that really torture of terrorists is justified by the common good or that drone warfare isn't problematic because, well, even if they aren't terrorists yet, those innocents who may be killed would be in the future. You get professors who praise el Che with no mention of his methods or the necessity of a continuing revolution. And, you get professors who argue that, when gays and lesbians are murdered in the Arab world, it's the Arab world that is the real victim—of Western imperialism and something called the Gay International—and not the people being killed; anyway, their blood is somehow on the hands of gays in the West. 

And, you get the phenomenon of Dawkins, et al., mischaracterizing theism and ignoring two thousand years of argument so they might fill auditoria. 

Of course, public intellectuals do sometimes do great good. Orwell surely did, Russell may have. But the temptation to publicity is a temptation to power, to reputation, to opinion, even the temptation to be a figure, maybe a controversial one. And, a pursuit of the truth and a pursuit of the expression of that truth—whether it be in the interests of power or not—is almost always going to make one unpopular.

You can be a public figure or you can be an intellectual, but it is damned hard to be both.