Cultivating Humanity
Nussbaum, Martha C.
Socrates didn't have tenure Dennis 6'Brien W artha Nussbaum, one of our most distinguished philosophers and classical scholars, has fashioned a " r e p o r t card" on contemporary liberal...
...Kimball distinguishes an artes libemles tradition (orators) and the "liberal free" tradition (philosophers...
...In sum, Nussbaum's Socratic ideal--noble as it is--either does not sit easily with the institutional reality of higher education, or Socrates' allegiance of a sort to an embedded civic wisdom does not sit well with Nussbaum's fundamental critical transcendence of tradition in the realm of reason...
...The oratorical liberal arts emphasize the tradition, recovery of a civic value...
...What Socrates seems to have distrusted most were the Sophists, those who professed to have a knowledge or skill which they could pass on for a fee to willing pupils...
...One problem with Socrates plus higher education is that for us higher education is through and through institutionalized...
...That at least is one version of the liberal arts...
...Unlike most philosophers setting out to prove a case, Nussbaum actually cites empirical evidence...
...I am deeply sympathetic to Nussbaum's views, and I offer hearty congratulations to all those present-day gadflies out on the front-line classrooms, yet there are limitations to her Socratic overlay on higher education...
...I Dennis O'Brien is tile attthor, most rece~#Iy, 0/c All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press...
...Her reassurance about the vitality of liberal arts is particularly striking coming as a classical defense of liberal education because it would seem that it is precisely the classical that has been eroded by contemporary interest in nonWestern culture, African-American studies, women's studies, and gay studies...
...Socrates didn't have tenure Dennis 6'Brien W artha Nussbaum, one of our most distinguished philosophers and classical scholars, has fashioned a " r e p o r t card" on contemporary liberal education: not failure, certainly not a "gentIeman's" C (politically incorrect), perhaps not A+, but very much alive and lively in an astonishing array of academic settings...
...She has personally tracked the practices of liberal arts teachers in such varied settings (among others) as Bentley College (essentially a business school), Notre Dame (a Catholic university), Brigham Young (Mormon), Randolph-Macon (small residential), University of Pittsburgh (large, state-related institution with significant commuter population...
...To be sure, he was critical of Athenian torpor, but he seemed to believe that the problem was not discovering the truth of reason above, but in waking up the embedded pieties of the existing polls...
...The central task of education...is to confront the passivity of the student, challenging the mind to take charge of its own thought...
...Eliot...
...In the Crito he imagines the Athenian laws speaking to him as the mother and father who shaped him and whom he coutd not now flaunt by abandoning the city...
...It is also not incidental that when push came to hemlock, Socrates refused to go into exile...
...The philosophical liberal arts opt for the critical, continual re-examination of inculcated cultural assumptions...
...Commonweal 2 7 April 10, 1998...
...Nussbaum's text shapes Socrates in terms of the later Stoics who advocated an ideal of the universal citizenship of reason and humanity beyond the confines of Athens or Rome...
...It is not incidental that Socrates practiced his critical art in the market place, in the gymnasium, and at drunken feasts...
...We should bless our Socrateses in and out of our colleges and universities, but the issues of higher-education-as-institution go beyond (or below) the great gadfly...
...Socrates believed that in the search for wisdom the best he could do was confess his own ignorance while querying merchants, generals, poets, religious prophets and whatCommonweal 2 6 April 10, 1998 all for any scraps of wisdom they might have come upon...
...I point to two significant ironies: Socrates' distrust of "professors...
...Socrates is never without his ironies...
...Are professors specially qualified, more than poets, politicians, or people of practice to offer a "guide to life...
...Socrates' civic piety...
...In his meticulous and indispensable study of the history of the liberal arts tradition (Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education), Bruce Kimball delineates two strikingly different ideologies of "the liberal arts...
...So much for right-wing critics who think that "liberal arts" is just all those dead, white, European males so long (too long) revered by the "classical curriculum...
...Nussbaum's nominal hero, representing the "liberal free" liberal arts, is Socrates...
...A second and contrary paradox is that Socrates does not seem (at least in the Crito nor in his life practice) to have been a proto-Stoic universalist...
...Chapter 1 is titled "Socratic Self-Examination" and the teachers and programs singled out for praise in one way or another replicate the persistent questioning of the great Athenian "gadfly...
...Nussbaum is firm in upholding universal reason as the great device for the critical appraisal essential to the liberal arts (in their liberalfree guise...
...It was Plato who invented the (our) academy, a sheltered spot for philosophers to practice their trade...
...Nussbaum assures us that despite apparent change the spirit of liberal education remains strong...
...To that end, "tradition is one foe of Socratic reason...
...The other "foes" of Socrates are those left-wing progressives who view "reason" as the claptrap invention of male hierarchy...
...It is the "liberal free" tradition that Nussbaum finds healthy and well on campus...
...Higher education is the Academy--a place set apart with professional standards, tenure, credentialing, certification, and so on, none of which makes much sense in the Socratic life-search for wisdom...
...To external critics, none of these educational turns, fashions, or fads look at all like the traditional classical curriculum, for example, "the Great Books" ( from Sophocles to Shakespeare t o - - well, maybe T.S...
...Socrates would be amazed--probably a m u s e d - - t h a t there are Socratic-like professors, that is, certified and tenured gadflies...
...The new--supposedly anticlassical--curricula do exactly what one hopes the liberal arts will accomplish: liberation of the human mind...
...At each of these institutions, she salutes individuals and / or programs which challenge students to think openly and creatively, to resist the "idols of the marketplace," to make up their own minds...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 7
