IWU faces its 10 year accreditation visit in three years, so we are doing the usual revisiting and reassessment of our general education curriculum. Here there are a number of terms and concepts that are often thrown around as if they are synonymous. But are they?
Is a general education curriculum the same as a "liberal arts" curriculum? Does a liberal arts curriculum constitute a "foundation for all the majors"? Is a liberal arts curriculum about being an "educated" person? a "cultured" person? To what extent does it have to do with life skills (instrumental value) and to what extent is it about truth as an end in itself (intrinsic value)? Are the liberal arts necessarily connected to the traditional subjects of the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music)?
Here are my working categories for the components of the "general education" core curriculum at a college grounded in the liberal arts:
1. components relating to "liberating pursuits"--this is the way IWU's own David Riggs has described the essence of a liberal arts approach to learning. The idea is that such learning "liberates" us from the shackles of ignorance, vice, delusion, and so forth. It enables us to be fully human.
2. components relating to "a cultured, college educated" person--this relates to knowledge valued particularly in the "Western" tradition without which a person in the West would not historically be considered an educated person.
3. the broad equipping of a person to function effectively in the 21st century world--this relates to awareness of the world beyond the Western world, a person who is generally based in such a way that they could function effectively in any other discipline, a base from which all other learning might proceed.
It is my contention that while there is significant overlap between these three centers, they each represent distinct aspects of a general education curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts. The introduction of the adjective "Christian" to the equation presents a new dynamic that significantly modifies and redirects the centers above.
My purpose in this post is to ask the place of philosophy in such a Christian general education curriculum grounded in the liberal arts.
1. In a non-Christian environment, philosophy stands at the very center of all "liberating pursuits." This is because philosophy asks the most fundamental questions without which the other disciplines never emerge from "the cave."
Without some sense of a philosophy of science, the sciences proceed without any sense of what they are really doing, like mice who do not know they are in an experiment of their own making. Without some sense of themselves, humans operate little differently from other unreflective animals. We do not fully exist until we define ourselves. And without an awareness that the world might be understood differently than we understand it, no one is truly free. The unexamined life is the life of one who is a slave to forces of which they are not even aware, forces that have mindlessly manipulated them into the blind positions in which they (don't) find themselves.
Philosophy thus stands at the center of the idea of "liberating pursuits."
The idea of Christian liberating pursuits introduces new dynamics that potentially challenge the place of philosophy at the center of human liberation. Now the motto must surely become "faith seeking understanding," and our sense of what constitutes meaning and individual significance takes on a particular form. A whole set of axioms and theorems are added to the operation of logic.
But the questions philosophy asks have not changed. It is only the presuppositions that inform the pursuit of the answers. And maybe, just maybe, God has already revealed some of the answers.
2. Certainly from a historic standpoint, there are any number of ideas and movements that should be a part of any curriculum informed by the liberal arts. An educated, cultured individual in the West should know who Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche were and what their most signature ideas were. A college educated person should have heard of Kant's categorical imperative and should know what a utilitarian approach to ethics is.
Someone might object: "The importance we have placed on these names and ideas is an accident of history, even a construct of a particular time and place." No doubt there is an element of truth to this claim. However, if we are to follow through on this argument, then why even speak of "liberal arts," since the notion derives from the Greco-Roman world and has historically been the province of European civilizations? The very word "renaissance" implied the intention to return to the pursuits of this world, and the great universities of the late middle ages were founded under these ideas.
It is certainly in keeping with the fundamental ideas of "liberating pursuits" to move well beyond European interests (#3). To allow ourselves to be enslaved to a particular cultural tradition would be to deconstruct the fundamental idea. However, it would be equally myopic to claim that any other cultural milieu has had a greater effect on the overall look of the world today, for good or ill.
The scientific revolution that has made the world into what it is today came from Europe, and it developed in conjunction with the ideas of the liberal tradition. Democracy is not the dominant mode of human culture. It was the European Enlightenment that brought this form of government into contemporary dominance. Similarly, it is the "Western" world that has brought into dominance a focus on the rights of individuals, an orientation around equal justice for all, and a sense that truth should not be truth for groups but for individuals. These ideas are ironically in peril even in American culture today. We ironically have followed the rightful idea of tolerance and openness to the ideas of others to the point where we run the risk of abandoning ideas that have made the modern world thrive.
Awareness of the persons and key ideas of this "Western" tradition is thus engagement in the most thorough engagement with the questions of humanity available to us. We run the risk of repeating the pitfalls of the past and missing out on the blessings of the present if we do not know these things and educate our successors in them.
3. Finally, as we have already said, we cannot limit ourselves to a knowledge of the European philosophical tradition if we want to rid ourselves of blind spots. Every true human is a philosopher, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that the ancient Greek Thales was truly the "father of philosophy." Any full pursuit of truth and true liberation must ask how other cultures throughout history have done philosophy and learn from them as well.
So what should a Christian general education curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts tradition look like in relation to philosophy? Clearly there can be no such thing as a liberal arts education without addressing the questions of philosophy. To remove it from such a curriculum is immediately to disbar the term liberal arts from use. Liberal arts without philosophy is not liberal arts.
However, Christianity clearly impacts the nature of philosophy on a fundamental level. My suggestion is a course something like, "Philosophy and Christian Thought." Courses in Bible and Christian theology probably stand even more centrally in a Christian liberal arts curriculum. But as far as a Christian liberal arts curriculum, "philosophy and Christian thought" would stand more centrally.
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6 comments:
I think the problem of a "Christian" college is that the "word" liberal scares some people...to allow free discourse and an open atmosphere of learning may lead some students beyond what is comfortable with the status quo. Is this wrong? I think it is probably due to fear that the individual student's faith will be shipwrecked on the shores of "learning", because the task of education in a "Christian" environment is understood as not "liberal" but "tradional" as in, maintaining the "company line".
The individual student's gifts and capacities are all gifts of God that must be allowed to develop fully. There is no "bad" information, only "contexts" of interpretation that differ. The context most important is the student's "self-understanding" within a broader world, and not limiting understanding within the confines of the Biblical text. There is nothing to fear, but fear itself and that which breeds fear and mistrust. The Christian college should not be promoting fear of any stripe. Human history has demonstrated what happens in the political realm when fear is used for the benefit of a "few".
Practical disciplines, like the sciences, desparately need to be put into a broader framework of philosophy, because, if not, scientists diminish the questions of "meaning". And the implications of diminishing meaning have profound reprecussions on culture and life itself. In a Christian context, science is not the epitome or "end" of learning, but helping the student to become a "better citizen" of the world at large!
The professor is to make avaiable an atmosphere of "learning", meaning that the environment challenges the student to stretch beyond their comfort zone, so that they can grow morally and intellectually. Faith is a re-orientation around the "new information" to make meaning (faith seeking understanding).
The postmodern challenge to the "Christian college" is anti-foundationalism. Perhaps the Christian college should address this challenge, not by denying and bullworking the "tradition", but by post-foundationalism. Agree with you adversary, while you are in the way with him....but don't stop at postmodernity's conclusions...Use them to address issues...For instance, this past Sunday, on a seris about leadership, the pastor shared the need for a "new paradigm" for leadership, under the auspices of "art" (aesthetics). It is not that leadership should be abandoned, but that leadership paradigms cannot function in the same way that they used to.
Paradigm shifts have happened throughout history concerning history/science/theology. So, the Christian college should not be shocked, appalled or "hide behind the bush", but be bold in educating themselves of the new paradigm, looking for creative ways to tackle the challenge and be hopeful!
Thinking further along the lines of science/theology.....in postmodernity (Quantum physics, where there is a recognition of two possible truths.)...radicalization of the individual....We must affirm these "truths" as "our" truth for today, just as much as the Catholic Church had to re-formulate their frame of Aristotle and Galileo and Corpurnicus in medival times...
How do we understand "two truths" in probability or how the obseversor and the obseved "interact"? Traditional Christian understanding is cause and effect, a mechanistic view of "life". So, organizational "planning" along the lines of outcomes is how "things are done". We do like control, because we like "outcome" (whatever the values are of that outcome)...So, church growth, organizational income, etc...a systems approach leaves little room for the "man on the bottom"...which in a Christian context should be abhorrent...But, no, just as postmodernity affirms, power is what we like, because it promotes our self interest and helps our self image. So, what to do? I don't know, I'm thinking along these lines...I don't believe that in a systems approach that the "man on the bottom" should be sacrificed or scape-goated because of the "outcome" or end in sight...Otherwise, people are only used for the "vision" and are not the ends in themselves...and thologizing to those who have been "trampled on" in the name of Christ does not play out too royally...How many of them are "now serving Christ"? The Church can dismiss these individuals and theologize again about their responsibility about these "outcomes" or "mistakes", but that does not diminish the people whose whole self concept, self understanding, and "hope" has been destroyed.
Here! Here!
As Josef Pieper has shown, philosophy's place in a liberal arts curriculum depends on people who do not find their identity as workers, but as human beings made in the image of God. Indeed, without that, there will no longer be any "liberal arts" to liberate people from the workaday world.
see http://www.ttf.org/index/
journal/detail/world-of-total-work/
"The World of Total Work" by
Dan Russ, a review of
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, Translated by Gerard Malsbary with an introduction by Roger Scruton (St. Augustine’s Press [1948] 1998), $12.
"Work is consuming our lives and—Josef Pieper would say—our humanity. I have recently observed cases of two disturbing instances of what Pieper calls the “world of total work.” The first is among friends and colleagues who are wired for vacations. By this I mean that they either choose or are expected to take their cell phones and laptops with them on vacations. They do so either because they are concerned about what their superiors or colleagues would think if they ignored the demands of the office, or because they fear missing something or someone that might be crucial to their professional lives. Indeed, a friend recently observed that as she and her husband take their annual pilgrimage to the shore, each year the beaches and coffee shops are increasingly filled with people on cell phones and laptops, doing business.
The second disturbing symptom of the “world of total work” can be seen in the obsessive ways we program and organize the lives of our children. Parents do it by signing them up for sports leagues, music lessons, scouts—anything that will keep them busy, off the streets, and give them (hopefully) a competitive edge. Schools do it with those reform movements that worry about “time on task”; many districts have in recent years reduced or abolished recess, the arts, and even some athletics. Most of this is driven by the real or perceived need to improve test scores, not only to evaluate the schools themselves but also so that we can sort and advance students—and so that they can be “productive” members of society. Indeed, the term most often used for the national movement to reform education into the likeness of business is the “accountability movement,” a term once used for measuring profit and loss.
Pieper (1904–1997), a German Catholic philosopher, foresaw our world. He warned us about the character of the world that was emerging after World War II, a world with no honor or place for the classical Christian understanding of leisure. Leisure: The Basis of Culture was first given as a lecture in the summer of 1947 and published in German in 1948. It is his description and critique of post-war Europe’s obsession with the business of rebuilding European society in such a way that everybody and every act must be practical and “useful.” How accurately this describes the global economy that pervades our world with its emphasis on productivity, profit, and doing away with “downtime.”
In contrast, Pieper reminds us that the very root and origin of classical and Christian culture has been to honor and make “a space of true leisure.” For example, the Latin root of our word for school, scola, means leisure. In other words, school was originally conceived as a place where young people could learn and contemplate what it means to be fully human through poetry and philosophy, mathematics and the arts. Yes, most of them would someday learn to do something practical and make a living, but they would first and finally know the meaning and value of being human, which includes but more importantly transcends the practical and the functional. Pieper makes a clear distinction between the universities, which are increasingly centers that train specialists to function in the marketplace, and traditional education, which “is concerned with the whole” of life, not just how to practice law, medicine, or accounting. Indeed, he warns of the danger of using the terms “intellectual work” and “intellectual workers” to justify doing philosophy and to avoid the new stigma of being “purely academic.”
While he is clear that he does not in this essay propose a program by which we can mitigate or reverse this march toward the pragmatic and functional, he does hold out hope that we are able to recover places and times of authentic leisure. Indeed, he says that all leisure that marks the fullness of humanity is rooted in religious practice, in festival, and—at its highest—in the worship of God.
Pieper suggests that those who practice such worship are witnessing to another way of being in the world, a way that sees life as, first and finally, a gift, a way that sees grace as life’s deepest value. He suggests that worship, festival, and philosophy can point us to a way of life that returns work to its rightful place: “We work in order to be at leisure.” One real difference such a perspective makes is to enable us to recover the idea that we take holidays—holy days—in order to commune with the Creator, the creation, and our culture, not vacations, in order to recover from and rest up for work.
My only disappointment with this penetrating essay is that Pieper does not incorporate more reflections from the Hebrew Scriptures, which give us a deeper and different understanding of both work and leisure from that of the classical Greek perspective. Working with one’s hands, as the life of Jesus demonstrates, is honorable in Jewish understanding, but so is the study of Torah, the discussions at the synagogue and the city gates, and the holy days and pilgrimages that marked the Jewish calendar and formed the rhythms of life. In short, I wish he had reflected more upon the epigraph he quotes from Psalm 46: “Be at leisure—and know that I am God.”
This slim edition includes a second essay, “The Philosophical Act,” which, while worthwhile, is a heavier read. It also includes an excellent introduction by Trinity Forum Senior Fellow, Roger Scruton.
Dan Russ is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and editor of its curriculum, Children of Prometheus. He directs the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College.
0 Responses • Reviews, Arts and Culture, Business, Meaning and Calling, Society, Thu 06 Sep 2007
Thanks for copying this piece here, Beth. I thought of the Greek word for leisure: skola.
beth b., I would love for you to give me some suggestions about reading material. Your response truely moved me, as I am struggling to "find a way" to maintain "faith" within a rationalist understanding. Lately, I have been resonating with seculare humanism (CFI) and would like to put thier concepts into a broader context...your suggestion of Pieper will help! Thanks.
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