We begin our discussion of the place of the liberal arts by putting the liberal arts in question. Consider the everyday perspective of activities and interests, of business and practical affairs. These may include patriotic celebration and the music and poetry connected to it. They may include religious ceremony. But they do not include the liberal arts as such. How do the liberal arts make their entrance? Why, from the practical perspective, do we need them? How can they justify themselves?

The central element of a justification concerns understanding the insufficiency of the practical activities in their own terms. This insufficiency reveals itself most starkly in the impossibility of defending the purpose and ends of such activities through the activities themselves. The physician as such cannot—with his profession and skill—show why health is good, when and where: where is death to be risked and where not? The producer of goods at any level from a shoemaker to a Ford cannot—through his distinguishing skill—show the propriety of the goods he produces. What purposes do they serve, how defensible are these purposes, do they serve these purposes appropriately? The lawyer learns legal technique within a judicial system; but he cannot say what justice genuinely is.

The necessity of thought about and consideration of these questions therefore emerges. But are they simply unconsidered in practical life? No: they are at root answered in any time and place by the way of life of the community—by its political understanding of the common good and the place of activities, professions and individual citizens in this good. Practical affairs in general, professional affairs in general, receive their justification within the common good. This priority of the political is less obvious in liberal democracies such as ours than in other regimes, but it is clear enough here. Yet, do the citizens, the root rulers of a regime—let alone passing administrations—genuinely grasp what is just or good? Can they defend their opinions from challenge? Are they aware of the possibility of challenge? Is a life devoted to pleasure best—or one devoted to productive work, or one devoted to politics? Is justice equal to equals? Unequal treatment based on ability? From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs? Here we see that the political community as such—and, therefore, all the practices and professions within its ambit—falls short of knowing what it most of all needs to know. The liberal arts can, therefore, first defend themselves, and demonstrate their meaning and significance, as reasoned thought and discussion about the fundamental purposes and goals from which all other activities take their meaning.

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But such a defense is insufficient because it understands liberal education to be ministerial. The school of law, the school of medicine, the school of business, the school of public policy do, indeed, all require an education which gives them direction, and the elements of this education can be found in the liberal arts. But if we leave it at this, the liberal arts are only a servant, even if they serve by guiding: they are at best the first servant of the practical world and of the education devoted to the practical world. A higher defense must show how and that liberal education is its own reward, an end in itself, indeed the highest end. A proper defense must show that liberal education is the most beautiful, most attractive, of human possibilities and therefore the most eminently—if not most concretely—useful. A proper defense of the liberal arts in education is no longer merely a defense.

Here we see that the liberal arts distinguish themselves from all practical activity by being that which considers, reflects, and exercises the distinctively human. All other education primarily makes up for our insufficiency as animals—for our lack of concretely assigned limits in food, sex, clothing, shelter. The professions and technical education are the chief contemporary way of turning our distinctive reason to these non-distinctively human necessities. And, as we have said, liberal education must inform these activities through its reflection on the ends, purposes, and limits which are given neither instinctively not by technical education itself. But the chief defense of liberal education is that it is itself the proper employing and exercising of our distinctively human traits. It is the training of reason in its own right; it is the experiencing of the fundamental causes and structures; and, further, it is the cultivation of the leisured enjoyment of the passions, the feelings, as they are informed by our reason and speech, that is, as they are human. Liberal education is both the shaping of reason for its own sake and the shaping of our most unique passions, the love of the beautiful, the sense of the mysterious and awesome, the sense of the ridiculous.

Liberal education therefore defends itself in the last analysis because it itself is the proper employment of playful leisure, which is superior to all serious activity, even great statesmanship. And it defends itself in the next to last analysis by guiding the serious activities and serious techniques—all seriousness is for the sake of something beyond itself. To put this in the most accurate traditional sense: liberal education is the forming of man’s distinctive liberality or openness; it is the shaping of the soul. In this sense, to continue to educate oneself liberally is the central goal of a lifetime; and we today are uniquely fortunate that it can be the most immediate and urgent task for so many for at least a few years.

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But have we not made liberal education too consistent? After all, liberal education comprises the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences; and at some schools we have decreed that this trio become a quartet so that the biological sciences become a separate quadrant. But these elements do not obviously belong to a well formed whole. The first and most thoughtful raising of this question of disharmony belongs to those ancients who first discovered liberal education: it is the question of the relation—the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, where philosophy comprises the subjects of mathematics, physics and biology as well as its own unique subjects. This quarrel is most beautifully and most amusingly developed in Aristophanes’ Clouds and Plato’s Symposium. In its general form it is a question considered by leading physicists of our own century; and it is familiar to us as the debate between the two cultures. The elements of the quarrel concern the relative rank of the activities which constitute the distinctively human. But this is to say that in their most intelligent form the contenders never dream of debunking one or the other side completely. Any debunking of the theoretical study of the root purposes of humans—any debunking of the philosophical elements of politics and morality, or the historical and literary experience of human greatness—runs up against the same problem of self justification which shows the limit of technical education. The natural sciences, and those social sciences which more or less perfectly ape the natural sciences, are themselves human activities standing in need of human justification. Any debunking of the physical study of nature, or of mathematics, thoughtlessly eliminates both a whole range of distinctively human activity and an entire area of love and experience of the beauty of truth and form. The possibility of the pure encountering and discovery of what is not human is a unique human gift; properly speaking the sciences are not inhuman. Now, we cannot defend each and every organization of the academy, nor each and every “discipline.” This becomes a practical matter to be dealt with prudently. But the chief consideration is that the divisions among those who love knowledge and beauty do not detract from the essential unity of the life of the mind, nor from the justification of liberal education as the attempt to express and develop our excellent and distinctive capacities.

Despite the fact that the organization of any given faculty of arts and sciences is a matter for prudent judgment, it is important to see that a defense of liberal education cannot properly—at the most general level—defend each and every activity that goes by the name liberal education. For the chief danger to liberal education lies within liberal education itself. Its current internal loss of direction arises from the inadequacy of the self understanding of the liberal educators; this in turn arises from the implicitly dogmatic attachment to opinions which derive from the greatest thinkers. These thinkers themselves are—as such—in no way dogmatic. Liberal educators often defend their enterprise as valuable, but only because we value it traditionally and values are in principle equal. Liberal educators often defend their enterprise as the expression of one culture which allows us to be open to other cultures. But by this understanding all cultures are in principle equal; the Greeks are at best a slightly higher form of Hottentot; the Renaissance Florentines are at best an inexplicably more interesting version of the “culture” of the ward heeler. At worst there is simple theoretical equality. Such an understanding cannot in fact defend liberal education because it does not consider the genuine necessity of educated understanding nor the genuine dignity of the cultivation of the human mind.

But this understanding, which talks in terms of the central and highest human abilities, faces its own danger. Its danger is the danger of degeneration to rigid philistinism or narrow political control. The understanding of equality in value and culture, which is inadequate because it leaves liberal education without a ground, is, at least apparently, more faithful to our openness, our contingency, our indefiniteness. Yet, cannot this openness be saved in a liberal education which defends itself properly as the expression of reason and its distinctive relatives? For if liberal education, among other things, puts into question the fundamental human purposes; if it deals with the radical openness of human choice; and if it expresses what is distinctive to man in its variety, it cannot properly become dogmatic and authoritarian. The search for knowledge of fundamental causes, and the discovery of what is beautiful, are, as such, a continual awareness of our incompleteness. But this search cannot know itself, the liberal arts cannot be truly open and liberal, without also recognizing the limits and distinctions between the human and the non-human. The liberal arts cannot be themselves without asserting their own dignity; and their own dignity is a kind of superiority. For they exercise the distinctive in man and therefore exercise the freest in man. And they do this by studying the highest—the fundamental natural possibilities. The liberal arts at best, therefore, do teach one to be moderate, and not improperly dogmatic, but also not excessively modest or timid.

THE danger to the liberal arts which arises from the excessive modesty of its defenders is not the only danger. If it is true that the liberal arts are essentially playful, if it is true that they are dedicated to knowledge and beauty but not dedicated to serious use, then we see that they face the danger of being and being seen as essentially frivolous. Liberal studies become perceived as the peculiar playthings of those lacking the talent to bowl with pleasure, not to say bowl for a living. Liberal studies are therefore of no more importance than any other frivolity. Here one might be tempted to concede the point and merely argue that serious pursuits—earning a living, ruling a country, fighting a war, securing health—are all ultimately for the sake of leisure and the use of leisure. But this is not sufficient. The playful and the leisured is superior to the serious but only if it properly exercises our capacities of reason and speech, and employs the senses—hears the music and views the art—most informed by these capacities. The liberal arts cannot be themselves without defending their superiority to frivolous entertainment. They are entertaining, but only to a certain audience which their very study forms. The liberal arts form a taste for the beautiful and excellent—the liberal arts generate a taste for more of themselves. By studying the liberal arts we learn to love the love of the beautiful, and to admire those who love the truth. In this way we hope ourselves to become those who love what is beautiful and what is true.

The liberal arts are also distinguished from the merely frivolous because what is studied in them is, among other things, the meaning and extent of the goals practical activity serves. Only what is considered by the student of the liberal arts can serve as a sufficient justification of practical affairs. Indeed: only in terms of the powers, possibilities, and capabilities of the human soul uncovered in the liberal arts can the practical skills and pursuits be properly appreciated in their own excellence. The merely frivolous activities furnish no grounds for such defense; and in terms of what the liberal arts uncover they are less significant, less human, than properly informed practice. This is the answer of the liberal arts to what is frivolous. It is also the answer—as we suggested at the beginning—to the serious and technical. The liberal arts can defend themselves from the danger arising from their apparent lack of utility by demonstrating the secondary nature of the useful, however urgent it is. Such a defense, of course, cannot outline the specific relations between what is urgently practical and the study of the significant but playful. But it does clarify the proper order of things, just as the liberal arts themselves clarify the proper order of things for all who pursue them, including those who become dominant in practical affairs.

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This argument does not overcome the fact that, in principle, the study of the liberal arts is not wholly compatible with political and moral life. Although the political community—as the ordering of serious affairs—takes for granted questionable opinions about justice, it is healthy that it do so, within limits. Individual morality requires that certain principles of right and wrong be taken for granted; practical affairs require artificial limits for their successful conduct. The political community and its reigning opinions are the chief among these limits. But the liberal arts challenge these limits. Are they not, then, destructive?

The problem of the meaning of the liberal arts is, therefore, a species of the traditional problem of the relation between philosophy, taken in its broadest sense, and politics, taken in its broadest sense. Here we must say that the study of the liberal arts leads to the salutary moderation of dogmatic political and moral opinion, salutary precisely because these are mere dogmas and opinions. But such moderation is indeed destructive unless the study of the liberal arts also moderates the possible contempt for, and destruction of, what politically and morally must be practically taken for granted. The liberal arts open the limits of everyday opinion; they moderate them, but also threaten simply to overcome them. But, when thoughtfully pursued, they also moderate our expectations concerning political and moral perfection here on earth. At best, they allow a reunion with what is best within the life of a community, now understood more fully. Perhaps a similar argument could be made concerning the connection of liberal education and the religious education it has largely replaced.

But does this not suggest that the liberal arts are the province of the few, whom we today call the elite? This cannot be simply denied, nor should it be simply denied, if a proper defense of liberal education ought not to fear making distinctions. But then, even if the study of liberal arts is salutary when engaged in properly is it not diseased when studied by those not fit? One might suggest that those improperly exposed to too much liberal education will more likely be harmed than harm—that the vague unease with the ordinary and acceptable will sour appreciation of the ordinary and acceptable but not threaten what is desirable in it. Be that as it may, the greater danger to the liberal arts is that they lose the rigor connected to their dignity once they become too popular. This is one half of the ancient problem of the distinction between philosophy in the broadest sense and sophistry in the broadest sense. The liberal arts in a democracy such as ours must welcome all who are capable of them and many who are not, but as much as possible they must welcome them on their own terms. Democracy at its best wishes universal excellence, the universal equality of the best, the aristocratic. Proper study of the liberal arts teaches the practical limits of this dream; but democratic openness in principle allows a greater entrance to the liberal arts and therefore a possibly greater expression of and awareness of the distinctively human than do other regimes here and now. This is a beautiful opportunity. But it makes it peculiarly difficult for genuine art and thought to hold their own here and now. What responsible teacher of the liberal arts—and the teachers are only students a bit further along—has not considered this danger in his own teaching and work?

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This mention of democracy leads to the final problem of the liberal arts today. This problem is that they, or some of them, have become too useful. Rather than simply appearing to be a danger to political and moral life, to serious concerns; and rather than needing or being able to validate themselves as the studies which consider the sources of the meaning of practical affairs, they appear to be extraordinarily useful—extraordinarily useful but still subordinate. This is the other half of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and sophistry. Not only must serious study be distinguished from the concerns and products of the journalists and intellectuals; it must also be distinguished from the concerns and products of the advisors, the research organizations, the translators of liberal studies to technical utility. The distinctive educational feature of liberal democracy is not only that it desires to spread a version of the liberal arts but also that it seeks to, and must, make use of their products. Liberal democracy is coordinate with enlightenment. And by revolting against the old authorities, it has no choice but to make reason a new kind of authority. When reason becomes an authority, when the products of reason and art are measured by utility calculated by reason, the genuine independence of reason and art is threatened—their dignity and their highest employment are threatened. Such a threat can be met. But it is particularly difficult to meet. For we all fall into justifying liberal arts along the lines of practical results; and we all fall into justifying these results through more or less sophisticated echoes of the dominant liberal experience of goods as values which satisfy our in-principle equal desires. Here we return to the problem the liberal arts face because of their own practitioners. Natural and social science must be defended from becoming mere technique, and the arts must be defended from becoming mass productions and the outlandish idiosyncrasies which are merely the negations of these productions. The liberal arts today face the unique dual danger of being useless—and, in another way, too useful.

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We conclude by surfacing from these dangers and restating the meaning of the liberal arts, in their highest form. The liberal arts are the fullest expression of man’s distinctive powers and have as their proper objects the most fundamental, most permanent, most beautiful, of human and natural possibilities. They necessarily stand in need of defense before urgent and serious practical considerations but at root they are superior to such considerations. They at once lead us to step boldly outside of ordinary limits and return us to the moderate understanding of ordinary and extraordinary limits. The task of the student of the liberal arts—of the lover of the arts and the sciences—is to make what is most important in itself—the objects of these arts and sciences—most immediately important for him. The task is to make the truly important the most urgent. This task cannot be perfectly fulfilled because of practical exigencies. But the student’s moderate—if you will ironic—understanding of his own inability to give to the objects of the liberal arts what they genuinely deserve is but another gift given to their students by the liberal arts themselves.