Bill D. came and had tea with me...and a bunch of other people, mainly students from the school where I teach History, English, and Rhetoric; based on his essay published in 2008 on the failures of elite education and his subsequent book Excellent Sheep: , William Deresiewicz , or "Bill D.," shares a commitment with our community: to return to education for its own sake, to eschew--at least for the undergraduate--the ultilitarian ends of a college education in favor of a true search for meaning, for the self, for truth, a return to the "liberal arts" tradition which, he says, teaches students how to think, how to speak, and teaches them about building the self. He has some beautiful, wonderful quotes in his book about the irreducible complexity of the world, the self, and that to reduce oneself and one's education to a utility is tragic.
With a gentle, friendly, intense look straight into my look, he shook my hand, and I liked him immediately; I felt that I could have many cups of tea with Bill D. and that the time would fly away and leave us in a long, delightful present of open conversation. As he began to speak, this impression was confirmed. He was apt to answer a question from a student with another question--in fact, a series of questions--in the way I imagine Socrates might ask--not as weapons but honestly looking for the filling of ignorance. He asked, "Why do you want to be a nurse? Have you had any experience?" And then he would listen carefully and respond with an honest assessment, but always with the caveat, "I don't want to presume, though--maybe I'm not understanding you?" This was a man willing to dialogue, even debate, but not the kind of debate that runs on disconnected factoids like little flaming arrows, or rhetorically powerful enthymemes like Greek fire erupting impossibly out of the water; he is open to other arguments, seems to desire genuine understanding, yet is honest about conclusions of which he feels certain.
Yet, in some ways, as a classical educator, I am almost diametrically opposed to Bill D.'s most basic premises, and to his definition of the liberal arts--more particularly "art." We live in a world Joseph Pieper predicted in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, a world in which simple, settled terms morph and become, simply not what they were, become more or less weaponized. When a word like "truth" becomes "subjective feeling," all of a sudden, centuries of culture and depth around a word, the meaning built with extreme care by the likes of Socrates and Aristotle, confirmed and embodied by Christ, and built upon by Aquinas, the meaning behind this little collection of symbols, the Object to the sign-word, becomes an inverse to the original. It becomes a weapon stolen from the hands of those who understood it, and used against them, against the young minds that Bill D. obviously, genuinely cares about. He is, in my view, a kind of tragic irony that only the modern world could produce.
In Chapter 8 of Excellent Sheep, Bill defines the liberal arts first as an education which is about forming the student, which I agree with; then, he began to define, implicitly, "art" in the modern sense of the word--literature, perhaps visual art, like painting or sculpture. This was the first clue that Bill D. and I were not speaking, in a sense, the same language in terms of the classical, liberal arts. He then seems to define the liberal arts as "humanities" like English and History classes, or works of literature, fiction, or perhaps poetry; none of it was very precise, but I caught the load of cultural 'common' assumptions--I got the feeling from the chapter that he simply expected me "to get it." But I have lived too long between the pages of Aristotle and Plato, with Aquinas and Augustine, and later liberal arts experts like Sr. Miriam and Fr. Ashley to accept the wide brush strokes Bill D. uses to define "liberal arts." Furthermore, the pages of this book seemed to cloud over and take on an ominous feel. I felt I was dealing with a nuclear submarine instead of the natural, familiar creature I was expecting.
My mind immediately went to Aristotle's Rhetoric, because in it he speaks very clearly to an "art" in practice, and how it is intricately related to knowledge of truth gained through rigorous argument. He calls "art" techne, from which we get the word "technology." But this techne is not just about tools; it is an activity, a craft and the crafted, art and artefact. "Art" in the sense of 'craft' is a transitive activity, in that it has an objective, an end; material, power, and form come together through art to produce something. In the art of rhetoric, one is producing a kind of seeing in the audience members, a vision, an image in the mind and soul which disposes the audience member to choose in a certain way. For instance, deliberative rhetoric is the art of persuading a person to either do something or to avoid doing something; for the Greeks, this is the art of politics, which, however, in a certain respect, Socrates found dangerous to the soul; through this caution, suspicion of rhetoric, Plato's Socrates delineates 'art' for us well in the dialogue Gorgias; he uses elegant proportional ratios, analogies, to indicate the true "art" of the politician: "as health is to the body, so justice is to the soul" and the the one who is practicing the "art" of helping the body reach its true end, health, is the artist, the physician, who has the epistome, or knowledge, of the body; likewise, the one, the metaphysician, the philosopher king, who has true knowledge of the nature of the soul can effect justice therein. In this brilliant stroke, Socrates shows simultaneously that art has an end in relation to natures, and it is founded on real knowledge--as an art, Socrates is suspicious of rhetoric as it is so easily abused if not having a "subject"--he keeps asking Gorgias, the famous rhetorician of his day, 'What is the subject of this art?" or, in other words, what body of knowledge is this art based upon? Aristotle seems to correct this lack of understanding in the aforementioned Rhetoric when he says, "Rhetoric is the counterpart [antistrophe] to dialectic." Here, he is using the language of Greek drama when he defines rhetoric as the symmetrical 'answer' or 'response' to dialectic, much the way the 'antistrophe' choral part in the drama is a refrain or response to the strophe. When I explain the relationship of rhetoric to dialectic, I ask students to imagine a line of masked, robed figures slowly, majestically dancing out from one side of the skene, chanting, and then another line emerging from the opposite side of the skene to sing their antistrophe. This is a powerful image Aristotle uses to describe the "same yet different" relationship between these two arts, dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic is, for the Greeks, logic in the sense of discovery and testing of arguments through conversation; it is the discovery of truth in accordance with the Good, the universal principles upon which the world, material and immaterial, is formed--this is the prior art, then, to rhetoric, and only rhetoric founded upon the rigors of knowledge gained through dialectic is worthy, or good, and truly persuasive: Aristotle claims that the human mind can know essences, and can recognize Truth; in fact, Truth, what is reasonable and in accordance with the real, is the most deeply attractive to us, and a knowledge, for Aristotle, more real than the experimental demonstrations we can do in the changing particulars of a material world, or mutable matter.
Fundamentally, Aristotle takes as a self-evident principle that our minds can, in some mysterious sense, have a certain unity with the kosmos, the ordered world, that we can know essences of the things around us, and that through reason, we can ascertain relationships and make true propositions about the material world, order itself, principles derived from experience of the particular, and even a higher order of thought and reason that can grasp the fundamental laws not only of the the physical world, but of morality, virtue, and the Good. In fact, Aristotle reasons through stages and orders of being, natures, right from prime matter to the Prime Mover (who is beyond the physical and is the root of all metaphysics, and in a supplemental way, physical order).
The liberal arts, as a species of techne, are the arts that are "intransitive"--the purpose, or end of these arts is the formation of the reason, the soul, the training and expanding of the faculties particularly human that allow us to see the whole and the part, and to understand the relation between the two. Through the arts of logic, rhetoric, grammar, some pure mathematics, and poetry (which in the classical tradition includes music, drama, story, poems, dance), a human person is developed to his or her highest potential.
Bill D., especially in Chapter 8, however, seemed to have a very different definition of art, though he seems to adopt the idea that it is, somehow about 'self-building'--'liberal art' seems to be, for him, an impression, or highly subjective conjecture, a bit the way I imagine some guy in 70s clothes having an "ah" moment in front of some Warhol piece in the MOMA. I like Warhol, actually, but I don't think seeing something about myself in giant Coke cans, or even more seriously in an Austen novel (a writer which Bill D. and I both adore), is the real deal about art, and certainly not the huge dustbin of "ah" self-realizations that Bill D. seems to think indicates the liberal arts. For him, the arts seem confused with a modern, narrow notion of poetics, though logic, dialectic, etc seem to be included in a confused way but not with any indication about what they are for beyond 'learning how to think. ' As this particular chapter progressed, the arts changed from 'thinking' to an equation with 'Humanities.' I ended up confused.
I therefore came to the tea very interested to see what he said about all this; as I listened to him, and partook in this invigorating conversation with this interlocutor who was willing to bare his thoughts to ours, and to receive and ponder ours in turn, I began to discern the structure of thought that created the scaffolding for the rhetoric of Excellent Sheep. He spoke passionately about thinking for oneself, and choosing education for self-formation, I wondered if he would begin to expound for them the beautiful organization that is the Trivium (logic/dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar) and the Quadrivium, and the Sciences upon which we use the faculties developed in the Trivium and Quadrivium. I wondered if he would explain how we can call "Metaphysics" a science because it is an enquiry into the deepest truths of the kosmos--in other words, that the whole education is for the purpose of freeing the person to find universal and material truths. However, when challenged by some young minds and hearts about seeing "truth" in the poetic images of literature and other 'arts' (in the modern sense of that word), he said clearly, 'Well, now you are making me think about this--I haven't thought of this that clearly, but I would say that, no, there's no objective, universal truth to be found in the arts." He continued, "I do think there is objective truth to be found in the sciences--empirical truth we find through science; but no, morals are culturally relative--even relative to the individual. I mean, think about it--when you read a book and then read it again ten years later, the "truths" you find in it change." A student then asked, "So the only objective knowledge we have is through material science, like modern biology?"
"Yes. There are "truths" you see in terms of recognizing something analogically about your own experience, your own life, but I do not believe in The Truth. I was religious as a child, and 'The Truth' was given to me through dogma. I don't see truth in that anymore, and I don't think there is universal truth about anything other than material science."
Pondering and picturing, mapping his premises backwards from these statements, I began to see the world the way he saw it, which seems to me to be quintessentially modern, a la Kant, or rather, Hume, the empiricist. Bill D. is a modern materialist, locked inside his own mind except for the moments when he can conclude with someone about the reaction of germs after 1000 experiments have been done, with multi-permutations of variable scenarios and control subjects. The 'truths' he enjoins young people to search for via the 'liberal arts' are simply self-actualization tools, and no more than that. They are again nothing but utilitarian because they have no higher end than toothpicks in a toothpick castle that becomes the 'authentic self.' C.S. Lewis had a name for these selves: Men Without Chests, people without anchor to anything solid, the abolishing of the human soul as having an end, a place, responsibility, purpose. If there is no possible connection to Truth, or anything transcendental forming and united with a rational, purposeful kosmos, then the human person is no more than self-conscious grass withering with the first onslaught of heat.
His arguments about cultural norms or evidence of natural law are the typical "he said, she said" tropes. Yes, I cannot empirically, scientifically demonstrate the moral order, because this order is not of the same kind of being as material experimentation; therefore, if one only accepts a narrow view of epistemology, then one effectively ostracizes any other form of knowing. It is like a child claiming that only the things he sees at the moment, in his vision, are real, and nothing else is. One looking at something else cannot argue with the child, because the rules have been set against his seeing anything else. It becomes a self-fulfilling reality, a self-justified inner circle.
I cannot therefore prove to him, or hope to have true dialectic about the moral law, the soul, even thoughts, because he lives in another universe, a Cartesian, Kantian, Humian one; yet he cannot prove to me through his own form of empirical, materialist model that thoughts, moral laws, universal principles, the soul, justice do not exist. In fact, a la Occam's Razor, the simplest answer built on our self-evident, collective experience, is that they do, in fact, exist.
In his world, he can define the liberal arts as he sees fit, because in the end, definitions don't really matter, just like the Christian, Aristotelian principles Jane Austen builds her novels upon, principles she saw as True, universals found through the particulars of her own time and place, particulars that repeated, like the antistrophe, the strophe of Truth about virtue and human nature, can now, for Bill D., become "ah" moments of "truths" he discovers about himself that will, and can change, as he does. He and I can't even share Austen in any way that matters.
Therefore, his "liberal arts" are dilettante-ish virtual realities that aid us in "self-creation," not the arts that are intransitive and yet allow us to ascend the ladder of Beauty, Truth, Goodness towards that moment when we, with Augustine can say, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."
I would still like to have more tea with Bill D., though, because I think he can dialogue without recourse to "discomfort" or "offense."
