Liberal Arts in Claremont, CA

Hey dudes,

Just wanted to show off this article I’ve written for the Claremont Independent, the Conservative student magazine on campus here. I showed up to one of their editorial meetings and they asked if I’d write an article on literature and the liberal arts; I said, “heck yes.” It was interesting writing it because Claremont McKenna is a secular liberal arts college. I saw this as an opportunity to introduce these guys to some Catholic voices on the liberal arts. Hope you like it,

CWolfe

Some Authorities on Literature and the Liberal Arts

Earlier this semester, I had the pleasure of attending a debate at the Athenaeum titled “Is CMC a True Liberal Arts College?” This was an interesting topic for debate, because the wording of the title implies two questions. First, “what exactly is a ‘true’ liberal arts college?” Second “should CMC be a true liberal arts college?” The debaters primarily discussed the second question, with conversation focusing on practical issues, mainly on the possibility of getting a job after college. From my vantage point, I did not the debaters adequately answered the first question before they moved on to rejecting or accepting it as the purpose of CMC. This is completely understandable; the liberal arts is a difficult subject to give its full due. I myself cannot give a full account of the liberal arts, but I do know of some authorities within the tradition and within the Claremont community that are up to the challenge of answering some of the more pressing questions surrounding the liberal arts.

Q. 1: Cliff’s Notes, anyone? Well, Cliff’s Notes do work well as shortcuts. The benefit of shortcuts is that they make exchanges quick, efficient, and cost-effective. Unfortunately, the opposite characterizes the leisured discussion of the free people. Leisure, as philosopher Josef Peiper says, is “the basis of culture;” in order to be open to what the liberal arts offer, we must be in a passive state of mind. I refer the reader to a 1990 CSPAN interview with Mortimer J. Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Program. A caller from Canada phoned in and asked Adler what he thought of his idea for a speed-reading program of the classics. With a visceral reaction Adler replied:

“No! You can’t speed read them. I think you have to read them word by word. You have to ponder the sentences. When I’m reading a great book I never read faster than 20 pages an hour, sometimes slower, because it’s hard, hard work… I never read more than an hour or an hour and a half, because I get tired.”

When asked if he had to choose between speed-reading the classics or not reading the classics, Adler said definitively, “No reading.”

Q. 2: What do liberal arts do for the human person? As a virtuous activity, studying the liberal arts has its benefits as well as its hard work. To those who support CMC’s focus on the liberal arts, the rewards are too important to be overlooked. Professor John Farrell spoke eloquently on the subject: “The liberal arts teach you how to approach the most important question concerning human beings, how to live. Before you can pursue that question, you need to have some sense of what the world is, what human beings are, and how they relate to each other.” Literature lays the foundation for answering this all-important question through the most natural of activities, which we have all engaged in since childhood- listening to stories. We need to listen to stories in order to understand man and his place before asking “what is the best way of life?” As Professor Farrell puts it, “the study of literature (including poetry) is the study of stories and story-making. All of our lives are guided by the stories we inhabit—stories about the world past and present, what it is and how it got here. We invest in stories about our nations, our institutions, the genesis and pursuit of our ideals, our own families, and our personal course of life.” Put in these terms, the liberal arts come to look less “useless” and in fact necessary for living.

Q. 3: What is the relationship of literature to the other sciences? The question of organization of the disciplines is a critical one. If Claremont McKenna is to be a true” liberal arts college, it must know which discipline is its queen. Without a hierarchy, there is no best way of life proposed, and academia reverts to its default relativistic mode. I would like to close this discussion on literature and the liberal arts with a reflection from John Henry Newman:

“The book of nature is called Science, the book of man is called Literature. Literature and Science, thus considered, nearly constitute the subject matter of Liberal Education… Science is grave, methodical, logical; with Science then she (theology) argues, and opposes reason to reason. Literature does not argue, but declaims and insinuates; it is multiform and versatile: it persuades instead of convincing, it seduces, it carries captive; it appeals to the sense of honour, or to the imagination, or to the stimulus of curiosity; it makes its way by means of gaiety, satire, romance, the beautiful, the pleasurable.” (from The Idea of the University)