As you all know, the theme of this year’s Colloquium is Student as Journeyman: Education, Formation, and Transformation. Mr. Powers asked me to talk on the education part of the theme. Tonight, I thought that we would look at liberal education and modernity philosophically. I wish to take as a starting point a quotation from Josef Pieper. “A properly philosophical question always pierces the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world . . .” Josef Pieper, The Philosophical Act, p. 73. If we view this talk as a seminar — and all of you will have a chance to participate later — the opening question is: “Does liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?” Clearly, the answer to this question depends upon what we take as the end of liberal education. So let us look at several ends that various people hold.

Career

Many people see the end of liberal education as an excellent means of furthering a career. For instance, the College Board declares that liberal education is “one way to prepare for a world in which new and unexpected careers are invented every day.” The College Board explains why: “Most liberal arts courses include a great deal of reading, writing, and discussion . . . [and in this way, the liberal arts student] gain[s] the ability to reason critically, communicate effectively, and understand relationships across broad fields of knowledge.”

Clearly, such intellectual skills are useful in most, if not all, careers. It is true that one benefit of a liberal education is that a person will be better in his or her chosen career. We all know graduates of Magdalen College who have become excellent teachers, scientists, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.

But when the end of liberal education is seen as preparing for a career, a student’s attention becomes focused on succeeding in the workplace, and the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world becomes thicker and more difficult to pierce.

Democracy

Other people see the end of liberal education as the furthering of democracy. The idea here is that democracy stands or falls with the voter. The better informed the voter and the better he or she can reason, the better the democratic society. Leo Strauss, in his essay “What is Liberal Education?”[1], tells us that “Democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are . . . virtuous and wise . . . Democracy in a word is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy.” But he points out that democracy today is not mass rule but mass culture, characterized by voter apathy, a lack of public spirit, an obsession with physical comfort, and an insatiable desire to be amused by mass media. Strauss then proposes what liberal education means here and now. “Liberal education is the counter-poison to mass culture . . . Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within a democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness.”

Now it may seem like Strauss’ proposed end of liberal education pierces the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world. When students read Homer and Shakespeare or listen to Bach and Mozart, they are imbibing a counter-poison to mass culture, and maybe they see for the first time the dome that covers modern life. The flaw with making democracy the end of liberal education is that philosophy is defined by politics, and this is seen in Strauss’ understanding of philosophy. In a letter to Eric Voegelin, a fellow philosopher, he writes, “The philosopher . . . recognizes only such experiences as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight.” He adds that the philosopher suspends judgment “until the facts upon which the claims are based have been manifested or demonstrated, they must be made manifest — manifest to all in broad daylight.[2] I will argue later that such a view of philosophy is essential Cartesian and is one of the defining elements of the dome.

Free Mind

Other people see the end of liberal education as freeing the student from unexamined opinions. Scott Buchanan, one of the founders of the Great Books program at St. John’s College holds that “Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher. Intellectual freedom begins when one says with Socrates that he knows that he knows nothing . . .”[3]

Certainly to be freed from unexamined opinions is laudable and is probably the first step in liberal education. That Buchanan makes a free mind the end of liberal education points to a major problem in modern intellectual life. Outside of the sciences, the belief that we can grasp the truth about ourselves and the world we inhabit is seen as a dream from the past.

Let me quote from an essay written by six eminent professors of literature and published by the American Council of Learned Societies. The learned professors assert, “All thought inevitably derives from particular standpoints, perspectives, and interests.”[4] In the Great Books tradition, most truths seem beyond our grasp. Let me return to Leo Strauss, he writes, “liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds.” Strauss points out that “since the greatest minds contradict one another regarding the most important matters, they compel us to judge their monologues.” But “we are not competent to be judges.” So, Strauss concludes, “Each of us here is compelled to find his bearings by his own powers, however defective they may be.” From my observations — and we can talk about this later if you like — most people, when forced to make their own way by their own powers, end up living a bourgeois workaday life.

To summarize, three proposed ends of liberal education — career, democracy, and a free mind — do not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Let us begin anew with a slightly different question than the one we started with: “How can liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?” To answer this question, let us first look at the liberal arts.

Liberal Arts

Traditionally, the liberal arts were divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music). This division is based on human nature. Human beings differ from other animals by their capacity for speech and for counting. In contemporary terms, the liberal arts seek to perfect the skills of students in the use of words and numbers. Through the practice of the liberal arts, students learn to define, draw conclusions from first principles, and analyze wholes into component parts. Such discursive or step-by-step thinking the ancient Greek philosophers called dianoia (ratio in Latin).

Dianoia operates almost in a mechanical fashion, repeating the same procedure again and again to arrive at a truth: A = B, B = C, therefore A = C; premise 1, premise 2, therefore, conclusion 1, etc. Clearly, a truth arrived at through discursive thinking involves individual effort and judgment as well as the perfection of intellectual skills.

The perfection of dianoia is an important part of achieving human excellence, yet as Strauss pointed out the ability to reason well does not allow us to judge the conversation between the great minds. Therefore, the perfection of dianoia does not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. To pierce the dome, we must see what about the human person is left out in modern philosophy, science, and education.

The Modern World

As the upperclassmen know from the Program of Studies, the two key texts of modernity are René Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Francis Bacon’s New Organon. Bacon sets forth the experimental method of modern science and Descartes its philosophy. Bacon asserts that the senses are infirm, weak, and not to be trusted. Furthermore, the senses are a measure of the cosmos according to man. For Bacon, “the senses judge only of the experiment, the experiment judges of the things.” See illustration.

Descartes’ method, now known as Cartesian reductionism, is to commence with objects that are the “most simple and easy to understand, in order to rise little by little, or by degrees, to a knowledge of the most complex.”^[5] Stated in modern terms: every whole is completely understandable in terms of its smallest parts and how they interact.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA, gives an example of how reductionism sets the agenda of neuroscience: “The aim of science is to explain all aspects of the behavior of our brains, including those of musicians, mystics, and mathematicians. . . . to understand the brain we may need to know the many interactions of nerve cells with each other; in addition, the behavior of each nerve cell may need explanation in terms of ions and molecules of which it is composed. Where does this process end? Fortunately, there is a natural stopping point. This is at the level of chemical atoms.”^[6]

Murray Gell-Mann, the first theoretical physicist to propose that some 100 particles in the atom’s nucleus, including the neutron and proton, are composed of fundamental building blocks that he named quarks, goes one step farther than Crick: “All of us human beings and all the objects with which we deal are essentially bundles of simple quarks and electrons.”[7]

Thus, two bedrocks of modernity are experiment and reductionism. The other bedrock was also set by Descartes. All philosophy must be founded on reason and experiment alone; nothing else is allowed. A corollary of this founding principle is that any claim to knowledge that is not acquired through reason and experiment is merely personal opinion, cultural myth, or religious superstition. That we can only acquire knowledge through reason and experiment defines the dome of the bourgeois workaday world.

So, what do the three bedrocks of modernity leave out? What is most important about the human person. The mind has two modes, what the ancients called dianoia and nous (intellectus in Latin).

Nous

Instead of arguing in a step-by-step fashion to arrive at a truth, nous directly grasps a truth. For instance, nous, in a flash, immediately grasps the whole of the argument. When a student of Euclid’s Elements comprehends how all the parts of a demonstration fit together and why they are there, he or she spontaneously shouts with joy, “I see it.” The phrase “I see it” accurately describes the experience of effortlessly grasping the whole of an argument or the connection between seemingly disparate things, for nous is like the physical eye gazing upon a landscape.

To know in the deepest sense is not to possess accurate information, say the names of the anatomical parts of a rabbit, nor to have a method that turns out correct answers, say a mass spectroscope that determines molecular masses. To know profoundly is to experience an insight, a revelation of a deep and significant truth. Such knowing cannot be summoned by the will, although insight is often preceded by hard work and the clearing away of major errors and wishful expectations. Sometimes, insight occurs only after giving up. In contrast to the truths arrived at through hard labor, intuitive insights are gifts. Consequently, dianoia usually results in pride, nous almost always in gratitude.

Let me give a few examples of nous. Henri Poincaré, in his book Science and Method, describes how he discovered the relationship of Fuchsian functions to other branches of mathematics. He had just returned home from a geological conference and turned his attention to the study of certain “arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connection with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”^[8]

Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss tried unsuccessfully for two years to prove an arithmetical theorem. In a letter to a colleague, he revealed that “Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”^[9]

Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle relates how the solution to what seemed an intractable mathematical problem in quantum physics came to him while driving a car on the road over Bowes Moor, much as “the revelation occurred to Paul on the Road to Damascus: My awareness of the mathematics clarified, not a little, not even a lot, but as if a huge brilliant light had suddenly been switched on. How long did it take to become totally convinced that the problem was solved? Less than five seconds.”^[10]

What Hoyle describes as a “huge brilliant light” and Poincaré calls a “sudden illumination”^[11] and Gauss terms “a flash of lightning,” the ancient Greek philosophers named nous, whose characteristics are “conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty,” as Poincaré noted. Clearly, we cannot command nous; the direct grasp of a truth is a gift, not something we can turn on or off at will, for if we could, we would.

Dianoia and nous are not confined to doing mathematics and science but are fully present in any intellectual activity. Mozart, in a letter, describes how he composes music. He puts together musical parts according to the rules of composition (dianoia), and when finished, he sees the composition as a whole — “my mind seizes it, as a glance of my eye would a beautiful picture” (nous). ^[12]

The importance of nous cannot be overemphasized. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, and many early Church Fathers held that the human person participates in divine life through nous. Unlike dianoia, nous does not function by formulating abstract concepts about God and His Creation and then arguing from them to a conclusion through deductive reasoning. Nous knows truths about God and Creation by means of immediate or direct apprehension. The silent, direct perception of reality by nous is called theoria in Greek (contemplatio in Latin). Theoria means “to behold, ” a special “to see” that occurs when a person becomes lost in an object, say a flower, and the self disappears. Then, the flower is seen as if for the first time, resulting in wonder about its existence and perfection. Depending on the depth of a person’s spiritual growth and development, contemplation has two main stages: it may be either the direct grasping of the first principles and the inner essences of natural things or, at its higher stage, the communion with God Himself.

Nous dwells at the innermost depths of a person’s being, at the spiritual center of every person’s life. This center is often called the “heart,” the place where the true self is discovered when the mysterious union between the divine and the human is consummated. Nous is sometimes called “the eye of the heart” to emphasize that it is the faculty of supernatural vision.

In the modern world, liberal education is directed by dianoia, for the perfection of the intellect is seen as a way of furthering a career, improving democracy, or freeing the mind. Unlike dianoia, nous and theoria pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world, because they bring us into direct contact with the nature of ourselves and things or at a higher stage with God Himself. Thus, one way for liberal education to pierce the dome is to have it guided by nous and theoria.

An Objection

An immediate objection arises. Liberal education cannot be directed by nous and theoria, since neither can be commanded or perfected, only dianoia is in the realm of human control. The reply to this objection is straightforward. Allow me to use the Magdalen College Program of Studies as an example of liberal education being directed by nous and theoria.

First, the Program of Studies seeks to cultivate and perfect the skills of the students in their use of words and numbers. However, the Program of Studies steps beyond instilling intellectual habits and directs the students to reflect upon their interior life. For example, students discover in the Geometry and Reasoning Tutorial that doing mathematics entails both discursive thinking (dianoia) and intuitive insight (nous). A student does not understand a demonstration of a Euclidean proposition if he or she merely follows the steps mechanically, as most students do in high school. True understanding occurs when the student suddenly grasps the whole of the proposition. Students are directed by the tutors to reflect upon their interior experience that caused them to shout with joy, “I see it,” and to understand why they are so desirous that the other members of the tutorial see what they saw. And, of course, students are aided in their ongoing reflection about nous by reading primary texts written by great thinkers.

In other tutorials, scientific, poetic, and philosophic insights occur. For instance, a student may suddenly grasp how the Iliad forms an integral whole, or why Socrates in the Phaedo, on the day of his execution, spins philosophical “tales” about the immorality of the soul to comfort his distraught friends. All tutorials develop logical precision and the close reading of texts. But, at times, a tutor will tolerate imprecision, falsehood, and sheer lostness as a way that students may suddenly grasp a connection between seemingly disparate things.

Second, the Program of Studies emphasizes first principles in a special way. Students read great thinkers who are in fundamental disagreement about first principles. But instead of succumbing to despair and nihilism because, in the words of Strauss, “we are not competent to be judges,” the Program of Studies allows for first principles to be directly experienced. To give just one example. When students reflect upon a near-perfect performance of the Magdalen College Choir, they see that they have experienced the whole is greater than the part and a loss of self. Unlike virtually all other liberal education, the Program of Studies recognizes the deficiency in only studying books.

Third, the rural setting of the Magdalen College encourages students to wonder about nature. In the Astronomy and the Rise of Modern Science Tutorial, students are asked to observe the nighttime sky and then write about their interior experience. Many students are moved to write poetry! The absence of radios and television sets on campus is conducive to interior silence, a prerequisite for contemplation. Only the silent hear and see. The Seeing and Drawing Tutorial and the Biology Tutorial both require students to spend hours in nature by themselves, either drawing or observing, in the hope that students will lose themselves in nature and directly see how wonderful Creation is.

In conclusion, only when liberal education is guided by nous and theoria will it have a chance of piercing the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Unlike liberal education which is directed by the perfection of dianoia and thus seen under human control, liberal education guided by nous and theoria is founded on the faith that every human being can directly grasp first principles and the inner essences of things.

Endnotes

This talk was given at Magdalen College on October 25, 2020. 

Main image: The stained glass dome at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel.  

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[1] Leo Strauss, An Address Delivered at the Tenth Annual Graduation Exercises
of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults June 6, 1959. 

[2] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 87.

[3] Scott Buchanan, “The Last Don Rag,” see St. John’s College website.

[4] George Levine et al., “Speaking for the Humanities,” American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, no. 7 (1989): 9.

[5] René Descartes, Discourse on Method in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. I, p. 92.

[6] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), pp. 259, 7-8. (Italics in the original.)

[7] Murray Gell-Mann, “Let’s Call It Plectics,” Complexity 1 (1995/1996), no. 5.

[8] Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (New York: Dover, 1952), pp. 53-54.

[9] Karl Friedrich Gauss, quoted by Jacques Hadamard The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 15.

[10] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982), pp. 24, 25. Available at http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1982ARA%26A..20….1H.

[11] Poincaré, p. 55.

[12] Mozart, quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, p. 16.