Fuller the Idea of the University on Strauss

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Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 37

Timothy Fuller is Lloyd E. Worner Distinguished Service Professor and professor ofpolitical science at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO 80903. Among books thathe has edited is The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education which Yale

The Idea of the University in Newman,

Oakeshott, and StraussTimothy Fuller

John Henry Newman composed his famous work on liberal education andthe university just at the moment when professionalization and specializa-

tion of university studies were initiating the transformation to the modern

research multiversity, constituting the major challenge to the very traditionNewman was defending. The Idea of a Universitybegan in 1852 as nine lecturescalled Discourses on University Education. There followed Lectures andEssays on University Subjects in 1858. Together, with revision, these reachedfinal form in 1873 as the work we now read.

Newman argued that all branches of knowledge are connected together,because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as beingthe acts and the work of the Creator . . . . There is no science but tells a differ-ent tale, when viewed as a portion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest

when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it of others.1

Newman had begun his lectures with a long defense of the necessary placeof theology in the university curriculum, arguing that the university cannotfulfill its object duly, such as I have described it, without the Churchs assis-tance . . . [the university] still has the office of intellectual education; but theChurch steadies it in the performance of that office(7). If liberal learningdemands study of the whole and of the unity of knowledge, theology and reli-gious study can be excluded only arbitrarily. Newman lays it down that allknowledge forms one whole(87).

In our day, the thought of pursuing the unity of knowledge fades as the

pursuit itself has disintegrated in practice, and the commitment to harmoniz-ing Reason and Revelation has only become more an object of academic sus-picion than it had already become in Newmans time. The vocation of liberallearning to apprehend the unity of the Creation, has been overtaken by sci-ence as a vocation, the positivist accumulation of knowledge in specializedfields of inquiry and the skeptical demythologizing of beliefs, as Mark Schwehndescribes inExiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America.2


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38 Academic Questions / Winter 200304

To acknowledge the universitys prerogative to occupy the office of intel-lectual education, as Newman did, to profess that the philosophy of educa-

tion is founded on truths in the natural order, without dependence onsupernatural discernment(50) and to accept the independent validity of thefindings of the various sciences as he also did, is not enough for those pursu-ing self-reliant intellectual autonomy or wishing to make the university an in-strument of temporal political change. Newman emphasized that he wouldreflect on liberal education simply on the grounds of human reason and hu-man wisdom,(52) without relying on ecclesiastical authority, but he defendedthe requirement for the study of theology and religion in the university andhe thought that human reason and human wisdom would, unless distracted,

naturally acknowledge this requirement. He thought that the word univer-sity implied the pursuit of universal knowledge (7) and that religious truth isnot only a portion but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out isnothing short, if I may so speak, of unraveling the web of university teaching(103). Newman was quite clear on what he thought liberal education couldachieve in its own right, and what it could not:

Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. Itis well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, acandid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the con-

duct of life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are theobjects of a university; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; butstill, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, theymay attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartlesspleasant,alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them (144145).

The need of a complementary theological contribution to discharging theduties of the university, or assisting in the formation of a fully educated hu-man being, is now generally rejected. Josef Pieper in Scholasticism3 describes acondition discernible in contemporary students, and not a few faculty, cor-roborating Newmans fears for coherence:

For the very moment anyone engaged in philosophizing abandons the guidanceof sacred tradition, two things happen to him. The first is that he loses sight of histrue subject, the real world and its structure of meaning, and finds himself insteadtalking about something entirely different: philosophy and philosophers. The sec-ond is that he forfeits his legitimate hold on the solely binding tradition, and musttherefore illegitimately andit must be saidvainly seek support in the mere factshanded down to him, in whatever historicalmaterial happens to be at his dis-posal, following the great thinkers whom he has encountered more or less bychance, or occupying himself industriously with the opinions of other people.4

Here Pieper, among other things, identifies and criticizes what we know asthe modern equation of liberal education with exposure to a wide array of


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For both Newman and Pieper there is a great or sacred tradition, ignorance ofwhich induces incoherence and intellectual chaos. Students are by and large

left to make something, somehow, of the variety of things to which they areexposed, as if the multiplicity of opinions does not demand searching for theright or best opinions, with the implication that ones own preferences may besecondary or inadequate. Faculty are uncertain about what to transmit to anew generation, especially if critical thinking proposes, explicitly or implicitly,that an inheritance is that which must be overcome and surmounted.

The current efforts in colleges and universities to create a first-year experi-ence or a capstone course are not so much efforts to recover what has beenlost or explicitly rejected, as they are reticent admissions of what has happened.

We should note also that much of what is called interdisciplinarity today erodesthe mutual corrective of the conversation of well-defined disciplines with eachother, a point shared by Newman and Michael Oakeshott.

Behind the reflections of Newman and Pieper is Aristotles argument thatthe fully realized human being accepts the necessity of occupation or worknot in order occasionally to enjoy recreation or amusement, but to attainto the leisure which, by enabling the cultivation of the life of the mind, isthe basis of culture.

Newman thought that intellectual education aims to remove the dimness ofthe minds eye, to overcome the haziness of intellectual vision, to look at thereality of the world directly and clearly. Intellectual formation is not completedby mere exposure to a curriculum even though that is indispensable: one can-not just learn in generalone must learn something concrete and particular.But while knowledge is indispensable, knowledge and learning are not identi-cal. No matter how much knowledge one acquires, this in itself will not guar-antee enlargement or illumination (150). If the aim is to see clearly the real

world, its structure and its meaning, skills are necessarily involved (includingthe capacity for logical analysis, for example), but the life of the mind is notsimply a skill or skillfulnessit is the choice of a way of living ones life, the

end of a liberal education is not mere knowledge, or knowledge considered initsmatter (153).

Newman and Pieper share a commitment to the Christian traditions im-portance for liberal learning. They recognize that modern universities arosein the Christian context historically, but also in the context of the revival ofthe learning of classical antiquity, resulting in tensions between theology andthe liberal arts that have shaped a good deal of the modern argument aboutliberal learning; liberal learning both has a long association with Christianity,but is also separable from it, and it seems increasingly hostile to it. Newman

observes that

The human mind cannot keep from speculating and systematizing; and if theol-


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are quite foreign to theology, will take possession of it . . . . [I]f they would certainlyresist the divine who determined the orbit of Jupiter by the Pentateuch, why am I

to be accused of cowardice or illiberality because I will not tolerate their attemptin turn to theologize by means of astronomy? (124125).

A fervent religiosity reveals itself in the widespread assault on the place ofreligion and theology in university curricula. Newmans prediction is borneout if the secularization of American colleges and universities over the pastcentury is understood to be a kind of religious project in itself, albeit a projectthat employs a vocabulary of progress, enlightenment, and liberation fromreligion, appropriating a religious sentiment but avoiding traditional religious

vocabulary.

Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss thus write in circumstances in whichthe secularization Newman rejected is insisted upon. This is the contingentcontext of their reflections, as they also, like Newman, are responding to theloss of the quest for the whole, and the skepticism about the value or meaningof such a quest; like Newman, they resist this spirit of the age. There is thusa substantial alliance among these authors in this respect. One must take carenot to downplay their differing views of what the quest for the whole signifies,

while still noting their agreement on the central importance of asking what isappropriate for study in the university by questioning the prevailing sentiment.

They agree, for instance, that the pursuit of learning demands a commu-nity of individuals collaboratively associated in this pursuit, what Oakeshottwill call a place of learning. Newman, describing a condition which we cer-tainly must recognize, insists that

knowledge is something more than a sort of passive reception of scraps and de-tails; it is a something, and it does a something, which never will issue from themost strenuous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual sympathies and nointercommunion, of a set of examiners with no opinions which they dare profess,and with no common principles, who are teaching or questioning a set of youthswho do not know them, and do not know each other, on a large number of sub-

jects, different in kind, and connected by no wide philosophy.5

Oakeshott and Strauss, renowned both for their contributions to, and asteachers of, political philosophy, wrote on liberal education nearly a centuryafter Newman, when the transformation of the university had produced anacademic climate in which Newmans idea of the university seemed to manyreactionary or practically implausible because separated specialization is in-evitable. Oakeshott and Strauss are defending in part what Newman defendedbut not all that he defended (which is not to say that they have escaped the

accusation of reaction). All three were teachers who thought seriously about,and wrote explicitly on, teaching and learning, and against the spirit of theirage All three focused on the idea of a university each in his own way trying to


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occupations. They defended the ideaof liberal learning. This is of fundamen-tal importance.

Throughout my academic career (including about nine years of senior ad-ministrative duties) I have necessarily participated in many discussions of thenature of liberal education, of the liberal arts. Both as a teacher and as anadministrator I have been obliged to try to explain the character and impor-tance of liberal education. More than a few times I have had to discuss thequestion, What is the essential content, or is there an essential content, of aliberal education? The question of the university and the question of liberallearning are integrally connected.

One addresses such questions today in an atmosphere of anxiety, skepti-

cism, resistance, and ignorance. There is little if any agreement on the essentialcontent, or the essential character, of liberal education even when there is akind of common discourse produced by professional proponents of highereducation who are often loosely attached if at all to particular places of learn-ing. Newmans discussion, despite its continued appeal to individual readers,seems to many an echo from long ago and, even if desirable, out of reach.Historians of education like to point out that through the ages there havebeen repeated disputes and controversies. One may acknowledge the historianssalutary reminder of the complexity, longevity, and inconclusiveness of thedebates, but this does not relieve us of the duty to understand for ourselves

what we are about; nor does history relieve the need to identify the elementsof liberal learning that persist through time. That there may be persistentelements is itself a legitimate historical inquiry.

I have come increasingly to think that we must attend to the essential expe-rience at the heart of liberal education, for it is the essential experience that isthe essential content. This experience may, as I think, require certain books ortexts as the necessary means to gain access to the experience. But it is theessential experience which is the aim of our engagement with the objects ofstudy we choose and the methods of study we employ. We must try to be clear

as to the experience and the way to it, and this means we must resist diversioninto merely practical, vocational defenses for, even if they accurately describesome advantages that go with being liberally educated, they obscure the expe-rience itself. Curricular discussions themselves, even when not preoccupied

with external critics, require this clarity.Attention to these matters is necessary not only to represent liberal learn-

ing to the larger public, but also indispensable for those who live in places ofliberal learning. Many within liberal arts institutions are neither clear on thesematters nor unaffected by anxiety, skepticism, and confusion. There are those

among us who say that it makes little difference what we study, that the veryquestion of an essential content is misconceived, that what is essential is criti-cal thinking and skills Part of this is the influence of Jeffersonian and


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the Deweyite commitment to social experiment, and the democratization andprivatization of which Tocqueville warned us. Part of it is the practical con-

cern for civic virtue and engagement, and the fear of losing republican virtue,which has always been an aspect of American thought on education. Part of itresults from an infatuation with change and innovation, and with technologi-cal approaches to learning. But while it is reasonable to innovate and inevi-table to undergo change, we should be suspicious of the alleged oppositionbetween tradition and innovation as if the one could preclude the other,or as if the essential experience cannot persist through the changing condi-tions.

I thus refer to essential experience in order both to recall the flourishing

of the human spirit, which liberal education has always supported, and to en-courage thoughtfulness about that experience. Concern for the content ofstudies, which has not disappeared from university debates, shows, to be sure,that we have not entirely forgotten these issues. But there is uncertainty andambivalence about how to address them. Skills are important, of course, andseem easier in our disintegrated condition to talk about, but separated fromthe substance of an education a deeper question remains unanswered.

Teachers have always known that there is a moment of transcendence inlearninga crisis point when the longer and more arduous path of inquirymust be chosen or abandonedwhich incites both resistance and attractionas it comes into play. This means that we must pay attention to the essentialexperience, avoiding definition merely in terms of skills without wishing inany way to impede the acquisition of skills.

For example, we might agree that self-knowledge is of the highest impor-tance. But acquiring self-knowledge is not adequately described as a skill. Itinvolves more than a once-and-for-all self-definition since it is a manner ofliving ones life in contingent circumstances, and thus involves discovery and

judgment; it involves both agency and constraint of agency; it is not a fixed,static self-image. It may involve a life plan but, in the disjointedness of life, it

often does not. This is an experience each participant in liberal educationmay seek in association with other participants, but we each also have to makeit something for ourselves. This is difficult enough to attain let alone to explain

when we live uneasily in the tension between enthusiasm for liberal arts edu-cation and guilt about its alleged elitism, its marginality, its resistance to

vocationalism and its refusal to explain awaybecause it cannot be explainedawaythe mystery of the human condition.

The question of the central experience of liberal education will bring withit inevitably a Why? question. Why should we go on with liberal education in

the face of turmoil, violence, war, and injustice in the world? One sensibleresponse is that, if we wait until there are no more instances of turmoil, vio-lence war and injustice we will never get to the life of the mind at all It has to


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not to be preoccupied with transitory events, with the temporal succession ofgoings-on, if the essential experience of liberal education is not to be obscured

or subordinated, we have to respond to those who begin their thinking fromthe intrusive insistence of the practical life which gives it the appearance ofpriority.

In speaking of an essential experience, we are forced to point to it in wordsthat are inadequate fully to capture or clarify what we are talking about, inpart precisely because they are not the words of the practical life, and no im-mediate, visible, material payoff may be assigned to them. The words are notunfamiliar: we speak of evoking or encountering the transcendent. Wespeak of transformation, of liberation from the here and now, of conver-

sion, of enlightenment, of the turning around of the soul as in Platosallegory of the cave, of leading the examined life, of learning as intrinsicallygood, good for its own sake. However, responses to these vary from the enthu-siastic to the skeptical. These are words that do not define liberal learning somuch as point to the experience that animates liberal learning or the attain-ment of it. So also we cannot simply define the liberally educated person interms of a checklist of skills or books read, although such a person will haveskills and will have read good books, but we can and do recognize such per-sons. Definitions, however necessary for some purposes, cannot substitute forthe art of recognizing the presence or absence of the spirit of liberal learning.

There is a danger, then, that the practical language frequently used to de-fend, and to advocate, liberal education may end up concealing the essentialexperience of liberal arts education even while trying to defend it. I do notthink we can avoid this difficulty; it is, rather, a recurring predicament wellknown to ancient authors, and certainly to Newman, Oakeshott and Strauss.But, if we are to recapture a common and concrete idea of the essential con-tent of liberal education, we will have to pay attention to the essential experi-ence which the content serves. I believe that Newman, Oakeshott, and Strauss,each in a distinctive way, understood this and attempted to convey that experi-

ence.

Michael Oakeshott wrote a number of occasional essays on school and uni-versity education and on learning and teaching, classifying different types ofeducation in terms of their distinguishing characteristics, including an essayon The Idea of a University. The latter and other educational essays are as-sembled in The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education,6 comple-mented by essays in Rationalism in Politics.7 School education, he thought, isthe acquisition of elements necessary for further learning before it is clear to

the pupil to what purposes or ends they may be put; it is learning to say thingsbefore one has anything significant to say. Vocational education is acquiringone or more skills to perform tasks of current interest and value in ones soci


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advanced level that may often presuppose university education but is sepa-rable from it and directed to different ends.

In expounding the identity of liberal learning in the university, Oakeshottoffered a variety of observations. These are usefully summarized in his essay,The Study of Politics in a University in Rationalism in Politics: University edu-cation is initiation into a civilizationthe emotions, beliefs, images, ideas,manners of thinking, languages, skills, practices and manners of activity out of

which [cultural artifacts] are generated.8 University education is a conversa-tion being carried on between a variety of human activities, each speaking

with a voice, or in a language of its own . . . the relations between them are notthose of assertion and denial but the conversational relationships of acknowl-

edgment and accommodation (187). University education is where we learnto recognize ourselves in the mirror of this civilization (188). University edu-cation provides, Socratically, for teaching people how to be ignorant . . . theimportant recognition of something absent (192). University education iseducation in languages rather than literatures, explanatory not prescriptivelanguages (193). University education is where teachers are also learners, en-gaged to learn more than what they teach.

For Oakeshott, the distinctive activity of the university is that of continu-ously recovering what has been lost, restoring what has been neglected, col-lecting together what has been dissipated, repairing what has been corrupted,

reconsidering, reshaping, reorganizing, making more intelligible, reissuingand reinvesting intellectual capital. In principle, it works undistracted by prac-tical concerns (194). It is a manifold of different intellectual activities, aconversation between different modes of thinking . . . some understanding of

what it means to think historically, mathematically, scientifically, or philosophi-cally (197). Here Oakeshott has put forward conversation among differentdisciplinary voices as the indirect approach to the quest for wisdom. The questfor the whole lurks in the background, echoing elements of Newmans argu-ment, but the fulfillment of the quest may or must be delayed indefinitely in

deference to the human conversation. Oakeshott once remarked that the phi-losopher may have a heavenly home, but is in no hurry to get there. In sayingthis, he meant, among other things, to say that we are human beings and mustremain so, and we are most human when we are disclosing to each other inconversation what we understand about ourselves and the world. He also meantthat anxiety for the future robs us of the enjoyment of the present. Liberallearning is a liberation from the here and now, from mere temporality. Topresent ones view is to invite response in hope of conversation. It is when wepass into politics that conversation becomes an argument or debate whereinthe goal is victory rather than the insight of wisdom, but where the victory

will fade in the interminability of the practical life.In his 1950 essay, The Idea of a University,9 Oakeshott spoke against one


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mission statement or strategic plan: This assumes that there is somethingcalled a university, a contrivance of some sort, something you could make

another of tomorrow if you had enough money, of which it is sensible to ask,What is it for? . . . that they are not clear enough about their function . . .but to quarrel with them because they are not clear about their function is tomake a mistake about their character. A university is not a machine for achiev-ing a particular purpose or producing a particular result; it is a manner ofhuman activity.10 To engage in this activity is not a gift of nature; it is a knowl-edge of a tradition, it has to be acquired, it is always mixed up with error andignorance, and it may even be lost. But, it is only by exploring this sort ofknowledge (which I believe not to have been lost) that we can hope to dis-

cover what may be called the idea of a university.11

In short, there is something internal to the experience of life in a universitywhich must be grasped and which establishes the universitys reason for being.The strategic plan and the mission statement almost always tempt us to lookoutside of the institution itself for a direction, a direction which is not neces-sarily grounded in, even perhaps contradictory to, the university experienceitself, and which may impose a justification in terms of activities and pursuits

which emerge from interests far removed from those of the university.Oakeshott urges that we must be jealous of the universitys emancipation from

the here and now of current engagements.Oakeshotts idea of the university, as he tells us in A Place of Learning, 12

derives from the experiences of the Wandering Scholars of the twelfth cen-tury and the recovery of ancient learning in the next several centuries. Thesort of learning that Oakeshott thinks is at the heart of university education,and which is not entirely lost, is to understand the intimations of a human lifedisplayed in an historic culture of remarkable splendour and lucidity and withthe invitation to recognize oneself in terms of that culture. This was an educa-tion which promised and afforded liberation from the here and now of cur-rent engagements, from the muddle, the crudity, the sentimentality, the

intellectual poverty and the emotional morass of ordinary life.13

Despite the complex threats to clarity in pursuing the intimations of a hu-man life, Oakeshott believes this engagement survives. He laments the descentinto relevance, but the real threat to liberal learning is not relevance alonebut the belief that

relevance demands that every learner should be recognized as nothing but arole-performer in a so-called social system and the consequent surrender of learn-ing (which is the concern of individual persons) to socialization: the doctrinethat because the current here and now is very much more uniform than it used to

be, education should recognize and promote this uniformity . . . it is the mostinsidious of all corruptions. It not only strikes at the heart of liberal learning, it

t nd th b liti n f m n 14


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Skills, critical thinking and general education (as opposed to liberal educa-tion), are abstractions from the substance of liberal education. Subverting lib-

eral learning is that approach which is

not only liberated from the here and now of current engagements but liberatedalso from an immediate concern with anything specific to be learned. Learninghere is said to be learning to think for oneself or to be the cultivation of intelli-gence or of certain intellectual and moral aptitudesthe ability to think logi-cally or deliberatively, the ability not to be deceived by irrelevance in argument,to be courageous, patient, careful, accurate or determined; the ability to read at-tentively and to speak lucidly, and so on. . . . But neither they, nor self-understand-ing itself, can be made the subject of learning. A culture is not a set of abstractaptitudes; it is composed of substantive expressions of thought, emotion, belief,

opinion, approval and disapproval, of moral and intellectual discriminations . . .learning is coming to understand and respond to these substantive expressions ofthought as invitations to think and believe. Or, this word general is used to iden-tify and to recommend an education concerned, indeed, with the substance of aculture, but so anxious that everything shall receive mention that it can afford nomore than a fleeting glimpse of anything in particular. Here learning amounts tolittle more than recognition; it never achieves the level of an encounter. It is thevague and fragmentary equipment of the culture philistine.15

There are those who argue that we have indeed lost the sort of learning

Oakeshott describes, or who even celebrate its disappearance, but I agree withOakeshott that it is still accessible. There are many factors that lead to disre-garding this sort of education, to failing to appreciate it, or to disdaining itsalleged antiquarian, outdated aristocratic (elitist) character. These are, Ithink, refusals of the idea rather than the loss of it. If the experience is afundamental potentiality of being human, it can be neglected or resisted butits possibility can never be absent from us.

What I would add is that the knowledge of this activity must be inspired bythe fundamental experience which this manner of activity has always soughtto protect and nurture. A tradition emptied of that experience by abstrac-

tion and abridgement is indeed lifeless. Here is Oakeshotts more relaxed ver-sion of Newmans unity of knowledge. The basic activity of the university is,quite simply, the pursuit of learning: This activity is one of the properties,indeed one of the virtues, of a civilized way of living. . . . What distinguishes auniversity is a special manner of engaging in the pursuit of learning. It is acorporate body of scholars, each devoted to a particular branch of learning:

what is characteristic is the pursuit of learning as a co-operative enterprise.The members of this corporation are not spread about the world, meetingoccasionally or not at all; they live in permanent proximity to one another.

And consequently we should neglect part of the character of a university if weomitted to think of it as a place. A university, moreover, is a home of learning,

l h t diti f l i i d d t d d d h


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the necessary apparatus for the pursuit of learning has been gathered to-gether.16 It is in this place where we locate the conversation of mankind,

attending explicitly to that which distinguishes the human being as human,recognizing that attention to this conversationality is essential in places oflearning.

One might summarize Oakeshotts outlook, first, by noting the emphasison restoring or reestablishing an inheritance and, in so doing, rejuvenating itby appropriating that inheritance to our use. Such a resource is not oppressivebut a ground indispensable to the meaningful exercise of our own intellectualagency. We cannot do without it and we misunderstand or deceive ourselves(and misuse or abuse the inheritance) if we think we can. Its presence is not

eliminated just because it is not admitted to be present. But also the universitypreserves its inheritance in the using of it, which, inevitably, fosters the emer-gence of new possibilities, not mere repetition. Traditions are not static; theyare complex arrays of interrelated voices often in tension. Conversation is oftenovertaken by debate and ideology but, when it is, it is a sign of extrinsic intru-sions.

Second, Oakeshott means to protect university study from politicization.He was especially concerned that, as the study of politics and public policybecame more prominent in the university curriculum, the temptation wouldgrow to define academic study as the carrying on of politics by other means.He certainly thought that to study politics in the university is legitimate solong as it is the philosophical and historical study of politics, aiming to identifyand explain the defining characteristics of politics rather than constructingdefenses of, or attacks upon, current issues of the day. In short, the question,

What is appropriate to the university?, cannot be replaced by the question,What does politics need presently? Politics should be studied in a university asa university studies things; studies in the university should not be shaped bythe felt practical needs of the moment. The inclusion of a subject matter prop-erly depends on showing its suitability to being examined as pursuers of lib-

eral learning examine things.For Oakeshott, the philosophical and historical study of politics is neither

intended to shore up nor to undermine political opinions, but rather to iden-tify the distinguishing (and limiting) features of political activity qua politicalactivity. What he rejected was such study of politics as suggests the insatiablecuriosity of a concierge. . . . A spurious academic focus for whatever politicalinterest there might be about.17Oakeshott also warns against putting too muchreliance on reading of the Great Books, the warning being not against thebooks themselveswhich he certainly read deeply and admiredbut against

a certain kind of reading: as a mixture between the manner in which onemight read an out-of-date textbook on naval architecture and the manner inwhich one might study a current election manifesto; obviously thinking of his


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(or enormity) of these books which narrowed attention down to listeningeither for the politicalfaux pasor for the echoes of political modernity.18

Oakeshott counsels against reading the Great Books for ideological purposes.He thought that the university was the place set aside for open-ended inquiry

where criticism and conversation need not be suspended. Human conversa-tion is interminable although frequently interrupted by the intrusion of de-bate inflicting defeat in search of triumph. In the world of practice, on theother hand, one must suspend criticism in respect of assumptions that moveones action in the worldhere triumph is necessarily sought.

The university is the place where practical concerns are not paramount andwhere learning for its own sake is possible. Indeed, even if this kind of learn-

ing can occur elsewhere, the university is likely to be the only place explicitlycommitted to this undertaking. If this distinction is compromised, the animat-ing spirit of liberal learningand the feature which is unique to the univer-sityis compromised. As he puts it, a philosopher is never concerned with acondition of things but only with a manner of explanation, and of recognizingthat the only thing that matters in a philosophic argument is its coherence, itsintelligibility, its power to illuminate and its fertility.19

The question will be posed: Are not we dwellers in places of learning in adesperate situation which requires us to set aside these scruples and acceptthe seductive appeal to intervene in the worlds affairs? But what is the inter-

vention which, in the name of the university, is not an abandonment of theuniversitys distinctive commitments and achievements? This is itself an in-quiry which depends on the understanding we achieve of the activity to which

we are called. Oakeshott thought human beings have always been in desper-ate straits and yet have always needed to preserve these distinctions. The placeof learning persists through the temporal succession of political events, rec-ognizing aspects of the human situation that transcend politics. We in ourtime are not special cases whose urgencies are cosmic exceptions to what otherhuman beings have experienced, and thus we must maintain the character of

the place of learning first and foremost.Oakeshott also thought that politicizationthe view that all meaning is found

in politics, that all activity is politicalis a profound mistake. Politics is impor-tant, but not everythingcertainly not necessarily the source of lifes mean-ingand it should be kept in its place. The existence of universities (places oflearning), not yet entirely forgetful of their distinctive role, keep alive a dis-tinction which Oakeshott took to contribute to the genius of our civilization.This is not a denial of civic responsibility or engagement; it is a reminder notto be confused about what changes in passing from one important realm of

human activity to another.

Leo Strausss assessment of liberal education is tied to his understanding of


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There is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recog-nition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to

diversity or individuality that are posed even by the most liberal versions of naturalright, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited culti-vation of individuality. They chose the latter.20

Nevertheless, Strauss, while not calling himself a democrat, calls himself a friendof democracy:

We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friendsand allies of democracy. While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dan-gers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannotforget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom

to those who care for human excellence. No one prevents us from cultivating ourgarden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citi-zens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone . . . We areindeed compelled to become specialists, but we can try to specialize in the mostweighty matters or, to speak more simply and more nobly, in the one thing needful.21

Strauss identifies the dominating influence of individualism and the culti-vation of diversity for its own sake. Strauss identifies this as a more explicitthreat to citizens souls than does Oakeshott, and he does not adopt the strictseparation of liberal learning from the practical life which characterizes

Oakeshotts approach; he wishes to foster the best that liberal democracy canbe. But what is common to both Strauss and Oakeshott, in this regard, is theconviction that it is the independent vocation of liberal education to maintainthat sense of inquiry without which the full flourishing of the human spirit istruncated.

Strausss outposts salutary to the republic obviously include what Oakeshottcalls places of learning. Because the animating spirit of education has be-come difficult to discern, the way in which such institutions are salutary isobscured. Those who have discernment are the friends of democracy insofar

as they are not distracted from what is noble in the midst of confusing multi-plicity and vulgarity. Strauss embraces the project to recover the ancient, clas-sical understanding of natural right, not the stabilizing influence of NewmansChurch. Yet consider Strausss remark on the passion of the philosopher:

The philosophers dominating passion is the desire for truth, that is, for knowl-edge of the eternal order, or the eternal cause of causes of the whole. As he looksup in search of the eternal order, all human things and all human concerns revealthemselves to him in all clarity as paltry and ephemeral. . . . Chiefly concernedwith eternal beings, or the ideas, and hence also with the idea of man, he is asunconcerned as possible with individual and perishable human beings and hence

also with his own individuality, or his body, as well as with the sum total of allindividual human beings and their historical procession.22


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whole. Strausss emphasis, Socratically inspired, is on the seeking rather thanon conclusions or doctrines. Nor does Oakeshotts conversation exclude that

quest, even though it remains reticent (as does Strausss seeking) about thesource which ultimately stimulates the quest. At the same time, for Newman,Oakeshott, and Strauss, it is the interaction and mutual examination of themodes of knowing that preserve the possibility of such a quest, constrainingour tendency to exclusionary, specialized learning in a putative division ofacademic labor.

If to comprehend any particular activity one must seek the distinguishingideaof that activity, the quest is not confined to collecting instances (is notsimply historical) but is the attempt to say what an activity distinctively is

what makes it the activity it is and not anything else, and what, in the case weare considering, distinguishes liberal education as such. This calls into ques-tion the attempts in our time to liken education to an industry or a businessenterprise or a policy think-tank. Like Newman and Oakeshott, Strauss un-derstands that the question of the eternal implies the limited usefulness of amerely historical inquiry into what liberal learning has been in its numerousinstantiations. Oakeshott argues for the historical understanding of politicsalong with the philosophical. But he does not do so because he thinks thehistorical understanding is preeminent. Rather, he sees that historical studieshave emerged as a distinctive aspect of the modern university with a set ofidentifiable canons for historical research. There is much to be learned fromthem, but to allow them to dominate the voice of philosophy (or of scienceand mathematics) would be to end the conversation in which we attend tothe multifaceted character of learning in the university.

To put it another way, one could say that, precisely because there is no pre-determined definition of university practices, even if it has a persistent identi-fying idea or experience, the question, when a discipline presents itself, is, Isthis sort of inquiry in a suitable condition to be a universitystudy? And, Is thisa voice that will enliven but respect the conversation? Not, Is this what the

world currently fancies or demands? There are those, of course, who will beuncomfortable that there is not a predetermined or functional definition ofthe university. There are those who will be offended by the thought that theuniversity is not practically accountable. But they ought to consider that, in abattle of conflicting definitions, competing functions, and interests, the re-source of the university tradition itself will be obscured and finally lost if it isexpected to define an answer once and for all. At the same time, this approachdoes not deem change a good thing in and of itself; the university is not forthe satisfaction of neophilia.

Furthermore, Strauss argues that the precondition for the quest for wisdomis to open oneself to self-transcendence, getting beyond preoccupation withoneself The transcendence of the self is elicited through Socratic dialectic


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of the disciplines to each other, and the theological reminder of the unity ofcreation which transcends the particularity and limits of the various disciplines.

The university is, in short, a collaborative community insofar as the membershave not lost sight of, or rejected response to, that impulse which gave rise toplaces of learning in the first place, and which continues to distinguish themfrom other important human institutions. The quest for knowledge and forself-understanding is not identical to the quest for self-satisfaction, self-expres-sion, or self-reliance.

Strauss admits that defending the Western tradition of liberal educationtoday must also respond to the pressure of other cultures and the global con-text. There is not one culture but many cultures. And he asks,

By limiting ourselves to Western culture, do we not condemn liberal education toa kind of parochialism, and is not parochialism incompatible with the liberalism,the generosity, the openmindedness, of liberal education? Our notion of liberaleducation does not seem to fit an age which is aware of the fact that there is not theculture of thehuman mind, but a variety of cultures. 23

Every comprehensive view is seen or experienced as a particular perspectiveover against other perspectives which claim comprehensiveness. We can, ofcourse, insist on our perspective because it is ours, and because we think it istrue, but we cannot deny the difficult questions posed by the global situation,especially if we hope to defend the proposition that what is ours has morethan local significance. We must not be ignorant of that to which we mustrespond. At the same time, if we are to defend what is ours, we also had betterhave a clear idea of the substance of what is ours. Strauss thus defended thegreat books as an essential element in gaining the desired clarity. In them canbe found the elements of a proper critique of the unexamined assumptions ofour time, the resources that the friendly critics of democracy must employ:

Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of

mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but specialists withoutspirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart. Liberal education is the ladder bywhich we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within demo-cratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of mass democracywho have ears to hear, of greatness.24

Liberal education is thus an antidote for the degradation of democracy, and,in this respect, must not be merely an extension of politics. Strauss has anaffinity with the writers of The Federalistand the author ofDemocracy in America

who still recognized the difference between democracy and mass democracy.It explains Strausss Socratic task as a gadfly of democracy. He is not denyingthe fact that ours is an age of conflicting worldviews, nor is he suggesting that


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This is what allows the possibility of distinguishing liberal learning from othersorts of learning, establishing the peculiar relevance of places of learning or

salutary outposts to the larger societies of which they are a part. That theyare, so to speak, impractical, reinforces all the more their, not always welcomed,relevance to the practical life.

Notes:

1. John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University (New York: Doubleday ImageBooks, 1959), 127. Page-numbers of subsequent quotations from this book will be citedin the text.

2. Mark Schwehn,Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America(New Yorkand Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3. Josef Pieper, Scholasticism(South Bend, IN: St. Augustines Press, 2001).

4. Ibid.,126.5. Quoted in Ian Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman(Notre Dame, IN: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1990), 15.6. The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1989).7. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, ed.Timothy Fuller (London and New York:

Liberty Fundnew, expanded edition released in 1991).8. Michael Oakeshott, The Study of Politics in a University in Rationalism in Politics, 187.

Page-numbers of subsequent quotations from this article will be cited in the text.9. Michael Oakeshott, The Idea of a University, in The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael

Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller (Yale, 1989), 95.10. Ibid., 96.

11. Ibid.12. Michael Oakeshott, A Place of Learning (1974), in The Voice of Liberal Learning, ed.

Timothy Fuller (Yale, 1989), 17.13. Ibid., 30.14. Ibid., 3132.15. Ibid., 32.16. Oakeshott, The Idea of a University, in The Voice of Liberal Learning,ed. Timothy Fuller

(Yale, 1989), 9697.17. Oakeshott, The Study of Politics in a University, in Rationalism in Politics, 208.18. Ibid., 208209.19. Ibid., 215.20. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953,

Sixth Impression, 1968), 5.21. Leo Strauss, Liberal Education and Responsibility, in Liberalism Ancient and Modern

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 22.22. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 211212.23. Leo Strauss, What Is Liberal Education? in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Cornell,

1968), 4.24. Ibid., 5.25. Ibid., 3.


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Documents

Fuller the Idea of the University on Strauss