International Catholic University
I'm Otto Bird and I'm here to talk to you about the liberal arts, something of their history and their philosophy. The liberal arts are preeminently the arts of learning, especially of intellectual learning, although these arts are also often present when other kinds of learning are going on. Hence to understand what they are and how they operate we need to consider the nature of learning, and that's what we are going to do in this first lecture.
Every one of us has had the experience of learning. All of us have learned both to walk and to talk, and for many of us learning continues throughout our lives. We also know that learning involves acquiring and obtaining something that we lack and don't have -- whether our way of performing or our way of knowing.
The English word to learn derives from a Germanic root meaning to become full or whole or unbound. Each of these presupposes a negative state -- being not full, not whole, or partial, and bound or tied up. The Latin for to learn is discere, which is the root of the English words discipline and disciple, and these imply following someone, often painfully.
To consider these matters more fully we need concrete examples of at least two different kinds: one where the learning consists in the acquisition of some bodily achievement, a certain pattern of bodily activity, another where the learning consists in the acquisition of a symbolic facility such as learning a language, in which bodily activity is subordinate to a pattern of symbols and signs. So let us first consider learning a game.
As an example of bodily achievement we could consider such an activity as learning to walk. However for comparison with an activity such as learning a language it would be better to consider a more complex example. For this purpose I want to consider learning to play tennis. Tennis, like dancing, is much more complicating than walking, and more complicated because it is involving much that is arbitrary or conventional. The rules of the game of tennis impose upon the bodily actions involved a form or pattern that is not determined by the movements themselves. Thus in tennis the action is confined within a playing court with a net, a ball, a racquet, with rules defining what a set is and a game, and a method of scoring that determines winning or losing a game. To these conventional elements there is no parallel in walking, yet all of them must be mastered in learning to play tennis. Yet these are the least of the things to be learned. The most important of all is to learn how to act, to move arms and legs so as to serve and return the ball so that the opponent will fail to return it properly.
The beginner at first seems all arms and legs, and when he manages to hit the ball it either fails to clear the net or flies outside the bounds of the court. Yet all the while the beginner is taking the utmost care with each one of his actions such as an infant does in learning first to walk. Indeed the obvious difference between the beginner and the expert is a conspicuous appearance in the beginner of conscious thought and action he obviously lacks and is trying strenuously to get -- what the expert already possesses. The beginner often feels at first that he never will acquire a facility, that he never will learn how to play tennis. He may even give up in disgust at his own awkwardness. Yet often after what has been one of his worst exhibitions, he will return the next day, or perhaps not until the next season, and discover that he has acquired marvelously the very facility that he has been striving for with such great effort. This acquisition, which may come suddenly or only gradually over a long period, is another of the major facts about learning. It too is one of the mysteries, one summed up in a telling phrase by William James to the effect that we learn to swim during the winter and escape during the summer. This is to say that after exercising ourselves in certain ways and then ceasing it is as though we continue to grow to the mode in which we are exercising ourselves. After we have so grown, we discover that we possess the facility that we strove for so unsuccessfully at the start.
Such a development is evident in all our physical accomplishments, but this kind of a development, and especially the lapse of time it may involve, should be noted by every student. To be aware of it is to be forearmed against one of the great discouragements in the life of learning, discouragement that comes when we wonder whether we are in fact learning anything and whether it is of any good. Mindful of this truth, James can say that no youth has any anxiety about the upshot of his education. Whatever the line of it may be, if he keeps faithfully busy each hour of the working day he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently between all the details of his business the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away.
The game of tennis has still more to teach us about learning. The accomplished player seems to take no thought of his actions. His body goes through the motions according to the pattern required by the game. The beginner on the other hand is weighed down by an excess of motion, certainly by too many waste motions and by the constant effort to control them. He obviously lacks the skill or the art which does this work of the accomplished player, and it is the presence of this skill or art that makes all the difference. The one has what the other so obviously lacks and is trying to acquire. Since this is something that he has you may call it a habit.
Empirical psychologists have made detailed analyses of the modifications that the organism undergoes in acquiring a habit. But long before them Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas were concerned to discover the kind of reality a habit is. They were not greatly concerned to analyze the physiological and psychological modifications that accompany a habit, although they recognized their presence, They were more concerned to investigate what a habit is with reference to the whole human person and the kind of ontological status that it enjoys. Such questions ultimately bear more immediately upon the nature of learning than questions regarding the physiological basis of habits. It is clear that the skill or art that is acquired confers a certain quality upon its possessor. By it he is able to perform an action which he cannot do without it except haphazardly and with difficulty.
This skill presupposes in the subject an initial ability which may be developed and directed. Without such an ability to start with, there would be no learning to play tennis. The skill that is finally acquired may be described, then, as developing and organizing an ability to be ready for the performance of a certain work. The skill, that is to say, is a readiness to perform. It is obviously not the same as the act or the work that is produced. The accomplished tennis player possesses a skill even when he is not playing, although we may not be able to tell it until he actually plays the game. To distinguish the skill from its actual use, let us call it an internal development of the person. It is something he acquires by and for himself, something which no one else can do for him -- a development grown from within rather than an accretion or a gift from the outside.
There is obviously also an exterior aspect to it, something that is more or less outside us in our command to which we must to some extent submit ourselves in order to acquire the skill that we desire. In tennis these are first of all the rules of the game. They are not of our making, and if we are going to play tennis we must familiarize ourselves with those rules and conform our actions to them. These rules are manifestly conventional in character. There is nothing in the nature of things that determines why they should be what they are, nor for that matter that there should be anything such as tennis at all.
Within the conventions of tennis we must distinguish different kinds of rules, and not all are conventional or equally so. They are what might be called natural rules that have to be observed and obeyed. Thus it is conventional that the ball should be served and volleyed over a net within a court but once the ball and racquet are in motion the path of the ball is not purely accidental and arbitrary. Because of the nature of the tennis ball and the racquet a certain amount of force is required to drive the ball over the net and keep it within the court. It is not accidental and arbitrary that once the ball is struck it lands in one place rather than another. We are dealing here with things that have certain natures even though they have been given a form that they did not possess in nature, such as the form of a ball, a tennis ball and a tennis racquet used in a purely conventional game of man's invention.
The good tennis player, we say, is one who has a feel for the ball and the racquet, which is to say that he respects their natures. Yet these are but secondary instruments. The primary instruments of the game are not ball and racquet, net and court, but the arms and legs of the players by which all the others are brought into operation. Our arms and legs are so constituted that they act in one way rather than another. They are not attached to universal joints for example. They too have their natural rules of operation but in a more basic sense than the ball and the racquet. There is but one kind of walking for all men and the fundamental motions are much the same. Learning how to perform these natural motions is not even learning in the same sense as learning to play tennis. Tennis as a certain pattern or structure is imposed upon the motions of arms and legs, and this pattern is determined by the conventional rules of the game even though these are controlled to some extent by the natural rules of the primary and secondary instruments.
In this broad sense of rule we might say that the whole task of learning to play tennis is that of learning the rules. Of these rules we may distinguish three different kinds. First, those governing the natural motions of their arms and legs. Second, those governing the motions of the racquet and the ball. And third, the conventional rules of the game itself. In the actual game the three kinds of rules are united in one series of actions, yet the pattern of the actions is determined by the conventional rules since the two other kinds are accommodated to it. Thus we might say that we have learned to play tennis when we have achieved mastery of those rules. It might seem far fetched to lay such stress on the conventional rules of the game. Learning the rules as we are using the term obviously demands much more than a book knowledge of them. One does not know how to play tennis unless he can realize the rules and action by playing the game. The action has its own kind of natural rules as we have seen but the game as a whole has a certain pattern of action and the structure of that pattern is determined by the conventional rules. What defines tennis is not the motions of arms and legs, racquets and ball, but the form that they take according to the rules of the game.
It was to get this conventional element that we chose tennis as an example of bodily achievement rather than such an activity as walking. To learn to walk one need only continue to do what comes naturally. Something more is needed to learn to play tennis -- namely mastery of the conventional pattern that is imposed upon the natural movements. This pattern is artificial in the sense that its principle is exterior to the source of the natural movements, since it derives from the conventional rules that establish tennis as a game. Such a conventional aspect can be found in many forms of bodily activity, in all our sports and games, in the dance, and in the ceremonial actions of man in society. But as we go on to inquire into the learning of the symbolic facility, we shall find that this conventional aspect becomes even larger.
If our long analysis of tennis has succeeded in isolating the elements common to all learning we should find them appearing again in the activity of learning a language. Yet we should also expect to encounter greater difficulty in seeing those elements. Bandying words about is not the same as volleying tennis balls. When we respond to a word we react to more than its sound, to something that is not susceptible of the same kind of test as the game of tennis. We can observe the game of tennis and watch the increase of skill and the greater dexterity manifested in the performance of the game. There is also an exterior action in the use of language, in talking and reading, but there is also something more which is the basis for its being called a work of the mind.
It's clear that the general elements of learning are the same both in learning to play tennis and learning a language. Learning a language presupposes an initial ability. Communication among human persons by means of words, which is the common understanding of language, is not something that we seek in stones, or oaks, or cats. If the inorganic and brute creation can talk, it is another language than the language of words. The gift of words which apparently men alone enjoy in this lower creation presupposes an ability to use them, an initial ability.
It is no less clear that learning a language finally results in the possession of a habit. Once we have learned English, each of us possesses a readiness to perform in and with the language of English. Our initial ability to learn a language is, as it were, generally directed. This is manifested in the quickness of the child to learn different languages. The acquisition of a specific language such as English is a perfection of this ability along just one line of development.
It is even clearer than in playing tennis that learning a language involves the acquisition of art and skill in managing a conventional structure. The language we learn as children is not something we are born with in the same way that we are born, for example, to breathing and walking. Granted a normal functioning of the bodily powers, all men breathe and walk more or less alike. But although it may be natural for men to talk by the actions of communicative sounds, they speak with the great diversity of tongues. Any one language is a structure of signs that are in nature and function for the most part a conventional construct of the social group whose language it is. Even the most cursory examination of all word or sentence functions as a sign reveals that language is both a construct and a convention.
Suppose I want a person to get up from the chair in which he is sitting. I might seize him by the hands and pull him up. In this case I have communicated the desired motion to him directly by the use of sign, of arms and muscles. On the other hand, and much more likely, I might try to move him by the use of language. Many forms of linguistic expression are available for such a purpose. I might command him with a forceful, "get up," or entreat him with a polite, "won't you please get up?" Or if it were a case of clear and present danger, I might get him to move by yelling "fire". In all these instances there is one thing in common with my actually pulling him out of the chair, and that is a direct communication of physical action. The percussion of air that I arouse by speaking strikes the listener more or less directly than seizing him with my hands. Yet in the case of speech it is not this action alone that gets him to arise. Such a direct physical motion may be a necessary condition for speech to function. You have to hear the words that I sound. But it's not sufficient, as at once becomes clear if I use a foreign language that the listener does not understand. There is still a physical action, the sound striking the ear, but he fails to make any answering motion; there is no communication; he doesn't understand.
This element of understanding is essential to the language in the main character that differentiates it from such an activity as playing tennis. As a physical motion the sounding and the moving tennis ball are much the same as the sounding words, but the ball gets its corresponding action by being that and nothing more. Whereas the sound will not achieve anything unless there is also the additional indifferent element of understanding. It may be argued that what I'm calling understanding is also a physical motion. It may be, but I do not think so. But this is not to the point here, for all I'm concerned to emphasize here is that this understanding is not the same thing as the word as a sound or material thing.
It is this element of understanding that makes the connection between the sounds and the desired action -- or it is the connection itself. It is in this connection that we can see how language is both constructive and conventional in character. The construct is immediately apparent, or at least one part of it. In using words we move the person from the chair. I select but a few from the whole range of sounds in English that I might be able to use. I now arrange these sounds in a certain order. I construct a pattern of sounds to somehow possess and convey some modicum of understanding. The result is a construct within the English language, but the whole of English is in fact only a selection from the range of speech sounds that we are capable of making. Other languages employ sounds and principles of organization that English does not utilize at all, which is only to say that the diversity of languages exhibits different constructs of sounds with understanding.
The construct of sounds that we make is related to the experience with which it is associated. Indeed, the element of understanding is just the establishment of this association. On the one hand there is an experience common in some way to both speaker and listener. In our example -- that is, arising from the chair -- there is the pattern of sounds uttered by the speaker, the expression, "Won't you please get up?" Finally, and most important, is the linking of the two, the connection established between speaker and listener, the communication revealed by the listener arising because of what he has heard. The establishing of such a connection in such a way constitutes the sign process, the act of signifying or, as it is sometimes called, semiosis. In ordinary speech this connection is a conventional one, which is to say that it is a result of human agreement saying linguistic sounds have been taken to signify as they do in a given language community, as in English chair refers to and means a chair.
Through usage and customs certain sounds have come to be selected out of a whole range of human sounds and organized in certain significant patterns. The resulting conventional construct is a specific language, English or Chinese. Conventional as so used to characterize a language can be opposed to natural. It then describes not the origin of the language but the modality and signification between the pattern of sounds and the experience they are associated with. How, for example, the expression man in English means a man.
Talking English is a produced work. It's conventional in contrast to a natural work such as walking. The form that walking takes among human beings follows from the power and organs of walking. It is more or less the same among all. Talking, however, although it issues from powers and organs as natural those in the case of the man walking, achieves no such unique and common work but comes to exist only as given a conventional patterning. We would have a comparable situation for walking only if walking could not be done except in the form of a dance in which the patterns of dancing were determined by the conventions of the social group. However the comparison limps badly, for though a dance may be significant it can exist as a pattern of motions without any reference to its signification. Whereas language does not exist at all without signification.
In making this distinction we touch upon an ancient controversy: whether language in its essence and origin is natural or conventional. One way of interpreting the Biblical story of The Tower of Babel is to see in it the divine imposition of conventional language as a punishment for human presumption. Prior to Babel men would have spoken a natural language, one in which the connection between things and their names is as intimately and necessarily connected as that between the power of walking and its exercise. Adam's review of the living creation, when the Lord leads all the animals of the earth and the birds of the earth before him, provides the occasion for the position of their natural names, for as it is said in Genesis, "for whatever Adam called them that was their name."
I want to dismiss the question of a natural or conventional origin of language as something irrelevant and sterile. Yet not to leave a place for both aspects of language is to falsify our most concrete experience of language. There is something natural as well as something conventional about language, and not just in the provincial sense that we feel native language is somehow more natural than foreign babbling. The instinct of poets is sometimes shared in the science of linguists and poets have often felt that there are natural springs of language which once tapped would sound the very heart of things.
With language, as with society, we have to hold that there is both a natural and a conventional aspect to it. It is not without significance that Adam's naming of the beasts follows immediately upon the notice of the social nature of man. "And the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone." What Aristotle noted about the state holds also for language. Man is social by nature, and yet he who founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. Man is a talking animal as much if not more so than he is a breathing and walking animal. And in this sense language is natural to him. But the particular language that a man talks is a conventional construct of sounds organized in a certain pattern of relations.
However our present concern is not so much with the nature of language as with what it can reveal about learning. As conventional, language demands that the learner acquire skill in managing its conventions, in making and using the significant sounds in the pattern necessary for accomplishing its purpose. The importance of the conventional element appeared also from the analysis of the game of tennis. The greater richness and complexity of language makes it possible to see more clearly what this involves. At the same time it has introduced a new element, that is the element of understanding which opens an entirely new dimension to learning.
Exploration of this dimension is perhaps most readily undertaken through the consideration of tradition and liberal art as these two elements appear in language. To say that language is a conventional structure expresses a tradition, and as part of it is left to give a name to an element that has already appeared, conventional as depending on the agreement of men in society. Language is a common work and a common possession. No one individual is its sole creator, although he may contribute to its development since language is also a developing thing. But above all it is a heritage that is handed down from generation to generation. As a common or social work that is handed down it is accurately named a tradition.
As a tradition language carries with it its own past. Often that past is deeply imbedded, so much so that it may be used with little awareness of its deep roots. Yet that past is always there and working often in hidden and mysterious ways. As George Olwell effectively showed in his horror story entitled 1984, a society that wants to destroy all sense of the past will have to create a new language, a newspeak as he called it. Although tradition is always present and carried in a language, great effort is needed to become fully aware of it and sound its depths.
Any given language possesses certain powers and limits of its own which distinguishes it from other languages. At any one time these capacities may be more or less fully exploited. It is nonsense to claim that any use of language is equally effective as an explicitation of the possibilities of the language. Measured against the native genius of the English language it is evident to anyone with ear and eye that Tudor and Elizabethan prose is not as fully developed as eighteenth century or contemporary prose. Even the ordinary writer today can write a better prose sentence than Saint Thomas More, one of the greatest Tudor prose writers. This however confers little personal credit on the contemporary writer. He owes his skill to the developed state of the language to which More and his successors contributed, the masters who helped to make our language what it is.
The labor of acquiring language as tradition becomes more evident when considering how a language may be acquired. It is perfectly possible to acquire a language by exposing oneself to nothing but the version of current speech that occurs in the daily newspaper. If we confine ourselves to such a source we will experience little of the power of the language, of the heights and depths of which it is capable. What is worse, we will possess no standard by which to judge whether the language we encounter is poor or excellent. To experience language at the height of its power, to see how excellent it can be, to possess models that incite to emulation, to enable us to care for and tend our language so as to preserve and foster it, we must have recourse to the great masters of the language, to its great poets and prose writers. Their work is classic in the sense that it exploits the capacities of the language within its limitations. This, as T.S. Eliot has said, is one of the basic notes of a classic.
In this sense to learn a language is to be initiated into a tradition. It is to acquire a tradition and to participate in it. This tradition cannot be denied; it can only be overlooked and neglected to the consequent loss of the work that language is capable of performing. What is thus true of language is true, as we shall see more fully later on, of all of arts and sciences. It is one of the elements of learning itself, where learning now in any area is in and part of a tradition.
This conventional nature of language of which we've been talking also reveals the presence of a liberal art. We have already seen from the example of tennis how it is under its conventional aspect a work of art. The form which the game takes, the game of tennis, receives its principles of organization and operation from the conventional rules of the game and not from the spontaneous movement of the human body. The extensive character of the form is even clearer in the case of language. The movement of signification whereby sound patterns are associated with experience is not intrinsic to the sounds. But it is the product of a conventional imposition as possessing an extrinsic principle of organization and operation.
Language is thus a work of art. That it is a liberal art appears from the way it differs from such an activity as tennis. If tennis has been overworked you might take the dance, or a painting, or a house. Any would serve equally well. What is common to all of these is the production of a pattern capable of existing outside the mind and outside the signifying process. A game of tennis or a dance is a pattern of bodily movements. A painting, a pattern of canvas and pigments. A house, a pattern of brick, wood and plaster. Each of these exhibits a pattern capable of existing separate from any concerned signification, even though some significance may also be there.
With language, however, this is impossible. Although it too provides an external pattern of sounds, the sounds made in talking, it ceases to function as language if it is restricted to only the patterns of sounds and noises. In the ordinary use of language we are always mainly concerned not with the language structure as an object in itself but with what it is about, what it signifies, communicates, what it amounts to, accomplishes. But with the dance, a painting, or even a house, our immediate concern is with the physical objects. We can get great delight from them as such without bothering at all about any other significance. But with words, the interest and delight that we can get from them as things without significations is greatly restricted.
The poetry of nonsense syllables for example is extremely rare. And poetry differs from other uses of language in having a much greater concern for words as things and structures in themselves. In fact the specific pattern that makes language what it is cannot be derived from the words as sounds alone. It is this fact which leaves linguists to claim that we have no recourse but to accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's psychic or spiritual constitution. Language exists, that is to say, as an artifact that is constructed within the mind and includes the signifying element that involves more than what is immediately given in the sound.
I'm speaking of language as an art, and I'm calling it a liberal art because it is a work of the mind. Now this use of the word liberal is somewhat special, although this use has its roots deep in the past, as we shall see when we come to consider the tradition of the liberal arts. Yet since this use of word liberal is different, it may be useful to see how it differs from what is perhaps a common conception. Cardinal Newman, for example, in The Idea of a University, determined the sense of liberal as applied to knowledge. He lists four notes as characteristic of the word liberal. Meaning: it denotes the work primarily of the mind not of the body. This is first characteristic. Second, something self-sufficient and independent of sequel. And third, rational as the germ of the scientific and philosophic process resulting. Fourth, in the habit as a personal possession and state of mind. Four notes that Newman gives for the word liberal.
Now Newman himself and some of his interpreters, even More, tend to emphasize the second over all the other notes. That is, it's a work that's self-sufficient and independent of sequel. He said it had no use. But if it is something that is self-sufficient and independent of sequel, then such an activity as cricket or golf can be considered a liberal art, since they are pursued for themselves, not as a means to anything else. Such a view plays havoc with the ancient notion of liberal art which is the one that I'm concerned with. What is more important, it is so broadened as to lose any precision of distinction.
As I am using it the second note, that is "self-sufficient and independent of sequel", is the least important of the four notes. It applies only as the objects of liberal art can be taken as the object of a science which is pursued for its own sake. There is an intimate connection with science, as I hope to show the liberal arts are preeminently the arts of learning which have science and philosophy as their highest achievement. Yet in their normal use in all kinds of learning they function more as means than as ends in themselves. Just as I am using the term liberal art, it must be sharply distinguished from liberal knowledge in Newman's sense.
Learning thus involves, as we have seen, both learning to play a game of tennis or learning a language. It involves both something that is known and something that is unknown. Both knowledge and ignorance then. In learning we think usually only of the object or the activity that we do not have and that we want to acquire, that element which is the unknown when we don't have it. But such a description immediately indicates that this unknown is not completely unknown. Otherwise we could not think about it at all. The child trying to form a sound or take a step already knows in some sense the sound or the step and knows too that its first efforts are inadequate to that knowledge since it seeks to correct them. Thus at the beginning of learning, at its roots as it were, is some kind of knowledge possessed in a way that is capable of development. Learning like science goes from the known to the unknown.
Now to attempt an analysis of this root knowledge would take us deep into philosophy. And in the case of language, very recent linguists have spoken of all of us of being born with a natural instinct for language. That instinct is developed only within the context of a given society, so within a given tradition. We can still appreciate some of the implications, though, of this innate, underlying capacity for knowledge, for learning. If learning proceeds from something that is known in some inadequate way to something that we don't have and don't yet know. The basis and root of all learning is in some sense already in us before we ever begin. Our ignorance is never so great but that we already possess at least the possibility of all knowledge.
This takes us to the very heart of the mystery about learning. Plato in his dialogue entitled The Meno has given the deepest and most provocative expression of this in his Myth of Reminiscence. In the dialogue The Meno, Socrates shows by questioning the slave boy how even the most unlikely possess a knowledge of truths which only the learned are thought to have acquired by the result of much art and science. Using theorems of geometry known by Socrates, Socrates shows how the slave boy may be brought from ignorance to a knowledge of certain theorems of geometry. To account for such a marvel he offers his Myth of Reminiscence: the knowledge must somehow please the soul, so that learning it is only a matter of remembering what has been known before. Plato offers this explanation as a myth, and it is a function of the platonic myth not so much to explain as to focus attention upon certain facts in our experience and their implications. In this sense the myth brilliantly focuses attention upon one of the central mysteries of learning: that all learning supposes at the start something that is in some sense known, and whatever unknown our learning may lead us to it can never be so completely unknown that we will not be able to recognize it.
Saint Augustine takes up much the same notion when he speaks of us all being born with certain seeds, certain semina of knowledge, which grow as we develop the way a seed grows into the plant or the tree. With this explanation of the roots of learning, as it were, we have encountered at once a certain difficulty. If all our learning is, as it were, the unfolding of something latent within us, how can there ever be any advance or progress in learning? It would seem to rule out any radical novelty in learning and force us to conclude that there is nothing new under the sun. Yet our experience convinces us of the very opposite -- of the fact no less obvious that novelty occurs, not only what is personally novel to us as persons as we first discover what is new for us, but what is radically and objectively novel, created events in the world of knowledge itself.
There is another side to learning in which we do go from the unknown to the known. Faithful to this, Plato shows in the same dialogue how by supposing as known what we do not know we can wrestle a known from the unknown. So we form an equation, solve for the unknown element in it, hoisting ourselves, as it were, by our own bootstraps. But this has only piled mystery on mystery. The known and the unknown seem to be changing sides. The fact of learning is in danger of being lost. So much for our discussion of learning and the liberal arts.