Few universities still have the courage to say that this is what you should study to be an educated person. They know only what a university is: a machine for producing credentials and stamping individuals as bona fide members of the elite. They are unable to articulate a clear vision of what liberal education is for. In particular they are unable to say what the term “liberal” in the phrase “liberal education” means….
To lay my cards on the table a bit, I’m going to argue that the kind of liberal justifications of liberal education I grew up with are no longer effective, and that teachers of humanities need a different way of defending the value of what we do and love. I think we can find such a way if we go back to the very beginning of the humanities in the mid-fourteenth century, which is also the beginning of the Renaissance. The Renaissance can teach us how to make a case for the study of old books that is compatible with the values of a pluralist society…. The humanities—rightly understood, taught, and practiced as a way of life—can cultivate human moral and intellectual excellence, the qualities our tradition refers to as virtue….
According to Leon Kass, writing in 1981, what liberal education did, among other things, was to make you open to conviction by rational argument. It had good moral effects, too, being “antithetical to intolerance, self-righteousness, smugness.” Seeking truth about the great life-questions made you a better citizen, able to assess political issues in deep moral terms. It also improved your relationships by giving you sympathy and deep understanding of others….
[Yet] New Left historians devoted themselves to exposing the racism and sexism of the Western past with a view to undermining its authority. The aim was to cripple our capacity to praise noble ancestors, which Rémi Brague has described as the condition of all civilization. Any aspirational ideals found in old authors were nothing but window dressing, designed to cloak concrete political and economic interests in fine language. To the extent that the authors were intended to transmit ideals, they were discredited by the failure of earlier societies to achieve those ideals….
Let me now sketch the alternative justification of humanistic education that I have in mind, inspired by my studies of Renaissance humanism and the Confucian tradition in imperial China. Italian Renaissance humanism, the direct ancestor of the humanities as we have them today, was born in the midst of a massive civilizational crisis in the mid-fourteenth century…. Eventually Petrarch and his many followers forged a new educational program which they variously referred to as the studia humanitatis, bonae litterae, litterae humaniores: literature that stimulated zeal for humanity, letters that made you good and more human. The core meaning of humanitas, according to many Renaissance literati, was a capacity to overcome natural human selfishness and to care for others….
Humanist literati believed that young men and women who read good literature (bonae litterae), above all epic poetry and oratory, would see what nobility and virtue looked like in action…. The study of history would enlarge their moral vocabularies by showing them the variety of customs in the world. It would give them sympathy and imaginative understanding of other times and places, and it would school them in prudence by vastly extending their natural memories….
What the humanistic education of the Renaissance did do in its finest expressions was to inspire students with a love of learning, moral excellence, refinement of manners, and unselfish service to the community…. They are certainly preferable, to my mind at least, to the goals of the humanities in modern universities, insofar as they exist at all: vague “enrichment,” provision of “critical skills” in a moral vacuum, or partisan indoctrination.
James Hankins is the author most recently of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (2019).
For a related post, see here.
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