The Study of the Uniquely Human
Classical educators who want to draw a distinction between their program and the program of education prevalent in America’s schools face a basic challenge. One of the features of American education I think most classical educators want to object to is its narrowly vocational focus – its emphasis on training students for gainful employment, to “compete in a global marketplace,” and so forth. On the other hand, it is probably fair to say that most classical educators also want to redress the increasingly doctrinaire project of activism that many schools are pursuing under the banner of “social justice.”
Yet these two tendencies seem to emerge from contrary motives. The frankly utilitarian terms in which American educators have become accustomed to describe their ends jars with the earnest - one wants to say fanatical - moral fervor that lies behind their attempts to render students vehicles of progressive activism. It is not obvious that these two ills spring from the same ideological source. Much less is it obvious how the classical educator, in framing his or her critique of the American education system, can account for both of these ills.
The famed debate between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley, occurring in the late 19th century, can help us find our way towards such a critique. The dispute between these two men centered primarily on the question of which set of disciplines was to lie at the heart of a university curriculum, with Arnold advocating the continued primacy of classical humanist belles-lettres and Huxley aggressively promoting the ascendancy of the natural sciences. What is striking about Huxley’s argument in Science and Culture is that it does not rest on claims concerning the technological application of the sciences - the sort of claims that have become popular in the century since he wrote. He does not think the reason science should be the primary thing taught in the university is because it is useful. Appropriating Arnold’s own language about culture comprising a “criticism of life,” Huxley maintains that science, much more than humane letters, endows a young mind with “a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and of its limitations.” “Our whole theory of life,” he writes, “has long been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the general conceptions of the universe, which have been forced upon us by physical science.” In its conveyance of an abundance of true facts about the world; in its explosion of mythical worldviews once dominant; in its inculcation of careful, even skeptical, habits of mind through its basic methodologies, a primarily scientific education is a complete education - so Huxley avers - imparting to its students a complete vision of life.
Huxley reveals the assumption underlying this pedagogy towards the end of his address when he insists that such an education would impress young minds with the conviction that “social phenomena are as much the expression of natural laws as any others; that no social arrangements can be permanent unless they harmonize with the requirements of social statics and dynamics.” He urges an inclusion of sociology in the curriculum so students “will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientifical questions,” and learn that “the machinery of society is at least as delicate as that of a spinning-jenny.” It is an evidently materialist ontology that undergirds Huxley’s educational program. If all there is in the world are physical causes, then a training in the study of those causes will suffice to know all that there is. On this account, there is nothing left for the humanities to explain; they may supply “a never-failing source of pleasures,” but they obviously contribute nothing to the stores of man’s essential knowledge.
This is the point of the brief history of the university he sketches midway through his address. According to Huxley, the university had its inception in the superstition of the Middle Ages, at a time when scholars were “allowed the high privilege of showing, by logical process, how and why that which the Church said was true, must be true.” The great virtue of “classical learning,” as it emerged during the Renaissance, was to liberate scholarship from such doctrinal constrictions, establishing in its place “an unhesitating acceptance of reason as the sole guide to truth and the supreme arbiter of conduct.” But this liberation marked the beginning, not the end, of the labor; it remained to physical science to culminate the reign of reason, banish the last idols of the mind, and fulfill the long-stalled promise of education. To subscribe to this history is to recognize that the humanities have grown as obsolete as theology – both vague, jejune assays at a truth that science supplies in its ripeness.
The rise since Huxley’s age of disciplines like Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, and Economics is no small evidence that his dream of a purely materialist study of man has taken root in our educational system. But in fact, the real spirit of Huxley’s vision is not manifested in these curricular novelties, but in the demoralization and loss of purpose that afflict contemporary schools. It is in the cheaply utilitarian ethos too prevalent there that Huxley’s fantasies have achieved their apotheosis. It turns out that the materialism out of which he imagined we could erect schools dedicated to nurturing “an unhesitating acceptance of reason” has served as a foundation for a uniquely deracinated and uniquely narrow program of education.
But in Huxley’s vision we discover too the origins of the humanities’ transformation of into instruments of political activism. Rendered more or less superfluous by the materialist assumptions undergirding Huxley’s curriculum, the study of the humanities loses any compelling rationale, and stand ready to be wielded in the cause of partisan combat by whoever comes into the control of their teaching. As such, it becomes imperative to make the humanities classroom a place where debate and discussion are avoided, rather than encouraged, since the single-mindedness of political activism is not forged through habits of contemplation. Those who regard the study of literature and history as a means of cultivating the uniquely human potentialities of the soul could never dream of allowing these disciplines to degenerate into activist weapons. But to those - like Huxley - who have lost sight of that mission, there is no reason why the literature classroom or the history classroom should not serve partisan ends, since it cannot conceivably serve any other.
So it turns out that the reduction of schooling to both vocational training and political activism have their roots in the same deracinated picture of human nature, a picture made up of nothing but “social statics and dynamics.” It turns out that the same constriction of vision leads both to a desire for profit maximalization, as well as a zeal for partisan causes. The momentum of these trends becomes self-reinforcing: the deterioration of the humanities into vehicles of progressive activism robs students of the intellectual capaciousness it is in the provenance of those disciplines to bestow, and this in turn leads to a further stifling of free inquiry within the parameters of that same progressivism. And so indeed, it seems that something vital is lost when we neglect the study of the human in properly human terms.
The task of articulating the scale and nature of that loss, both to itself and to the public, is the prerequisite for the success of classical education. So what would such a task entail? Arnold’s initial rebuttal of Huxley hints at its proper form. In response to Huxley’s dismissal of the medieval university as a slough of prejudice and superstition, Arnold maintains in Literature and Science that the theological program lying at the heart of the institution found its substantive justification in the fact that it “so deeply engaged men's hearts, by so simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their desire for conduct, their desire for beauty.” In the wake of theology’s decline, it falls to the humanities to cultivate our sense of conduct and our sense of beauty, through a mode of learning that is fundamentally creative, encompassing a labor of soul-building. From this labor alone does a school derive its genuine rationale, and the integrative vision capable of drawing together our disparate strands of knowledge into a unified program worthy of a young soul’s potential.
What Arnold is gesturing towards in his response is an insight worked out far more elaborately in the work of Giambattista Vico. Vico too was anxious about the increasing displacement of a classically humanist curriculum for the sake of accommodating instruction in the natural sciences. In “On the Study Methods of our Time,” an address he delivered to the faculty of the University of Naples, Vico lamented the fact that “we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics,” and that “we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, of its dispositions, its passions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence.” The operative assumption here is obviously that an exclusive training in natural science does not fit a mind for the study of human nature, but represents a neglect of that study. And the first consequence of that neglect is that “a noble and important branch of study, the science of politics, lies almost abandoned and untended.”
Vico’s New Science can be read, among other ways, as a manual in the methodologies adequate to a study of the properly human. The “poetic history” he sketches there – frequently baffling in its esotericism – delineates the “forms of thought” (to use a phrase of Erich Auerbach) intrinsic to civilization at its emergence, through which the sense of conduct and the sense of beauty receive concrete expression in custom, ceremony, and institutional structure. Vico emphasizes throughout his work the acculturating thrust of all these forms, so there can be no doubt that the study of social life is the study of human creative activity. This is what makes it amenable to our understanding, but it is also what makes the study of culture – which is just what we mean by the humanities – itself an acculturating activity, for from this labor the mind extracts an “ideal eternal history” against which the value of our own character and culture may be measured. Thus the New Science epitomizes the principal (to cite Auerbach again) that there is no cognition without creation. The intellect, when turned upon itself and its own expressions, never just observes or records what it finds, but is always forming its own powers through the encounter. The mode of learning acquired through humanistic study is always a mode of bildung, and thus falls entirely outside the methodological scope of the natural sciences. This is why Vico can claim that a ruling maxim of his work is that “whatever all or most people feel must be the rule of social life.” The forms of thought and feeling which shape social life constitute the basic conceptual material of humanistic study, irreducible through any causal analysis the scientist can impose upon them. “These are the boundaries of human reason,” warns Vico in regard to that irreducibility, “and transgressing them means abandoning our humanity.”
It was with an eye towards lending some theoretical precision to those boundaries that the philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote his Logic of the Cultural Sciences. What he argued there, quite persuasively, is that culture presents us with an “intersubjective world,” intractable to the conceptual apparatus of the scientist. The causal analysis of cultural forms of expression guarantees their misunderstanding, as each of these constitutes a structural integrity, in which a whole vision of life is encapsulated. To pry even cursorily into that realm is to recognize the role played in humanistic explanations by categories of belief, intention, and reasons for action. Yet as Alasdair MacIntyre argues in Chapter Seven of After Virtue, these would be precisely the categories we would need to eliminate in order to construct any kind of materialist framework of human life. The impossibility of eliminating them points to the inevitable delusiveness of such a framework.
One thing these categories all have in common is that they are all presupposed by ordinary political debate. To claim that power should be exercised in this manner, but not in this; or that legitimacy lies in this institution, but not in this, are modes of discourse drawing upon an intentional, rational conception of human nature. Otherwise, they are mere persiflage. To attain a broad acquaintance with the cultural forms in which these distinctively human traits are expressed is to imbibe the potentialities of our nature, and thus achieve a fitness for constructive participation in civic and social life. The civic humanism that flourished in Florence during the early part of the 15th century, under Salutati and Bruni, was only one particular manifestation of the political training that is always imparted through a humanistic education. Quite rightly did Vico fear the decay of politics ensuing from a neglect of the humanities, for there is nothing in the sciences he saw replacing them that can supply such a training.
It follows that any systematic attempt to dislocate the humanities from a central place in the curriculum must be coincident with a project of rendering young persons unfit for a regime of rational political debate. And, of course, this was exactly what Huxley told us he was up to by advocating the suppression of “mere literary instruction” – teaching students to handle human questions like scientific questions so that they can become adepts at managing the “machinery of society.” The modern school – the school that has sprung from Huxley’s vision – is a house of preparation for a regime of social control. That is why the humanities have been debased into partisan indoctrination there, which is just another way of eliminating “mere literary instruction.” But it is also why those schools train their students to regard their education primarily in terms of economic efficiency. Because this is the way you teach young people how to manage and control – and how to be managed and controlled. For all our laments about the condition of our schools, perhaps we should acknowledge that they provide the perfect mode of tutelage for apprentices in our regime of social control: a regime in which employment is dependent upon distant corporate masters; in which culture operates as an impediment to reflection rather than its auxiliary; in which the exercise of political power is guided by mere assertion, and the brazen corruption of our leaders impresses the populace daily with a sense of their own powerlessness.
It is important to clarify what the classical educator ought to regard as the proper object of redress in these developments. In its attempt to recover a proper esteem for the humanities, classical education may seem to withhold due respect for the sciences. Yet as Huxley’s argument makes clear, it is not the implementation of the sciences per se that have led modern education down the route I have delineated; it is the conviction that these disciplines suffice for a complete account of human life, with all of the metaphysical assumptions behind that conviction, and all of the curricular choices that stem from it. A classical school is one where the sciences are taught with all the rigor and depth they deserve, but where their methodology is complimented by the methodologies of those disciplines that takes the uniqueness of human social life under its purview.
The consequence is a mode of schooling that departs radically in its ends and practices from the predominant American mode of schooling. As time goes on, I think those differences will deepen and solidify, and the rivalry between these two modes will grow more explicit. It will become ever more apparent to the public that the typical American school aims to prepare young people for life in a system of social control, whereas a classical education seeks to cultivate first that “sense of conduct” and “sense of beauty” that Arnold extolled. Whereas the typical American school approaches its students as components of that “machinery of society” that Huxley spoke of, destined to occupy their roles in various networks of management, the classical school renders a young person fit for the familial, cultural, and political responsibilities encompassed by the human community. And while the typical American school seeks to bludgeon young minds into a state of mental passivity concordant with the processes of management, by narrowing their purposes and suppressing their inclination to ask questions, the classical school supplies a regimen in the habits of a free mind, a program of bildung rooted in a thorough study of the uniquely human. As time goes on, it will become ever more apparent to the public that the unique humanity of their children is most likely to be respected and cultivated where the uniquely human is studied, and that is in a classical school.