Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 37

37
Timothy Fuller is Lloyd E. Worner Distinguished Service Professor and professor of
political science at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO 80903. Among books that
he has edited is The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, which Yale
University Press published in 1989.
The Idea of the University in Newman,
Oakeshott, and Strauss
Timothy Fuller
J
ohn Henry Newman composed his famous work on liberal education and
the 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 tradition
Newman was defending. The Idea of a University began in 1852 as nine lectures
called Discourses on University Education. There followed Lectures and
Essays on University Subjects in 1858. Together, with revision, these reached
final 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 being
the 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 place
of theology in the university curriculum, arguing that the university cannot
fulfill its object duly, such as I have described it, without the Churchs assis-
tance . . . [the university] still has the office of intellectual education; but the
Church steadies it in the performance of that office(7). If liberal learning
demands 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 all
knowledge 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 liberal
learning to apprehend the unity of the Creation, has been overtaken by sci-
ence as a vocation, the positivist accumulation of knowledge in specialized
fields of inquiry and the skeptical demythologizing of beliefs, as Mark Schwehn
describes in Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America.
2
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 on
supernatural discernment(50) and to accept the independent validity of the
findings 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 would
reflect on liberal education simply on the grounds of human reason and hu-
man wisdom,(52) without relying on ecclesiastical authority, but he defended
the requirement for the study of theology and religion in the university and
he 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 is
not only a portion but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is
nothing short, if I may so speak, of unraveling the web of university teaching
(103). Newman was quite clear on what he thought liberal education could
achieve in its own right, and what it could not:
Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It
is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a
candid, 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 the
objects of a university; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but
still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they
may 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 the
duties of the university, or assisting in the formation of a fully educated hu-
man being, is now generally rejected. Josef Pieper in Scholasticism
3
describes a
condition 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 guidance
of sacred tradition, two things happen to him. The first is that he loses sight of his
true subject, the real world and its structure of meaning, and finds himself instead
talking about something entirely different: philosophy and philosophers. The sec-
ond is that he forfeits his legitimate hold on the solely binding tradition, and must
therefore illegitimately andit must be saidvainly seek support in the mere facts
handed down to him, in whatever historicalmaterial happens to be at his dis-
posal, following the great thinkers whom he has encountered more or less by
chance, or occupying himself industriously with the opinions of other people.
4
Here Pieper, among other things, identifies and criticizes what we know as
the modern equation of liberal education with exposure to a wide array of
loosely connected, or even unconnected, academic subjects and experiences.
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 39
For both Newman and Pieper there is a great or sacred tradition, ignorance of
which induces incoherence and intellectual chaos. Students are by and large
left to make something, somehow, of the variety of things to which they are
exposed, as if the multiplicity of opinions does not demand searching for the
right or best opinions, with the implication that ones own preferences may be
secondary or inadequate. Faculty are uncertain about what to transmit to a
new 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 been
lost or explicitly rejected, as they are reticent admissions of what has happened.
We should note also that much of what is called interdisciplinarity today erodes
the mutual corrective of the conversation of well-defined disciplines with each
other, a point shared by Newman and Michael Oakeshott.
Behind the reflections of Newman and Pieper is Aristotles argument that
the fully realized human being accepts the necessity of occupation or work
not in order occasionally to enjoy recreation or amusement, but to attain
to the leisure which, by enabling the cultivation of the life of the mind, is
the basis of culture.
Newman thought that intellectual education aims to remove the dimness of
the minds eye, to overcome the haziness of intellectual vision, to look at the
reality of the world directly and clearly. Intellectual formation is not completed
by 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 (including
the capacity for logical analysis, for example), but the life of the mind is not
simply 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 in
itsmatter (153).
Newman and Pieper share a commitment to the Christian traditions im-
portance for liberal learning. They recognize that modern universities arose
in the Christian context historically, but also in the context of the revival of
the learning of classical antiquity, resulting in tensions between theology and
the liberal arts that have shaped a good deal of the modern argument about
liberal 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-
ogy is not allowed to occupy its own territory, adjacent sciences, nay, sciences which
40 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
are quite foreign to theology, will take possession of it . . . . [I]f they would certainly
resist 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 attempt
in turn to theologize by means of astronomy? (124125).
A fervent religiosity reveals itself in the widespread assault on the place of
religion and theology in university curricula. Newmans prediction is borne
out if the secularization of American colleges and universities over the past
century is understood to be a kind of religious project in itself, albeit a project
that employs a vocabulary of progress, enlightenment, and liberation from
religion, appropriating a religious sentiment but avoiding traditional religious
vocabulary.
Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss thus write in circumstances in which
the secularization Newman rejected is insisted upon. This is the contingent
context of their reflections, as they also, like Newman, are responding to the
loss of the quest for the whole, and the skepticism about the value or meaning
of such a quest; like Newman, they resist this spirit of the age. There is thus
a substantial alliance among these authors in this respect. One must take care
not 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 is
appropriate 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 Oakeshott
will 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 the
most strenuous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual sympathies and no
intercommunion, 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 youths
who 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 as
teachers of, political philosophy, wrote on liberal education nearly a century
after Newman, when the transformation of the university had produced an
academic climate in which Newmans idea of the university seemed to many
reactionary or practically implausible because separated specialization is in-
evitable. Oakeshott and Strauss are defending in part what Newman defended
but 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 their
age. All three focused on the idea of a university, each, in his own way, trying to
liberate that idea, the animating spirit, from the control of mere current pre-
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 41
occupations. They defended the idea of 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 the
nature of liberal education, of the liberal arts. Both as a teacher and as an
administrator 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 the
question, What is the essential content, or is there an essential content, of a
liberal education? The question of the university and the question of liberal
learning 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 essential
content, or the essential character, of liberal education even when there is a
kind of common discourse produced by professional proponents of higher
education 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 have
been repeated disputes and controversies. One may acknowledge the historians
salutary reminder of the complexity, longevity, and inconclusiveness of the
debates, 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 elements
of liberal learning that persist through time. That there may be persistent
elements 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 is
the essential content. This experience may, as I think, require certain books or
texts as the necessary means to gain access to the experience. But it is the
essential experience which is the aim of our engagement with the objects of
study 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 diversion
into merely practical, vocational defenses for, even if they accurately describe
some 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 of
liberal learning. Many within liberal arts institutions are neither clear on these
matters nor unaffected by anxiety, skepticism, and confusion. There are those
among us who say that it makes little difference what we study, that the very
question 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
Emersonian self-reliance with its preference for insight over tradition,
42 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
the Deweyite commitment to social experiment, and the democratization and
privatization 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 it
results 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 opposition
between 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 of
studies, which has not disappeared from university debates, shows, to be sure,
that we have not entirely forgotten these issues. But there is uncertainty and
ambivalence about how to address them. Skills are important, of course, and
seem easier in our disintegrated condition to talk about, but separated from
the substance of an education a deeper question remains unanswered.
Teachers have always known that there is a moment of transcendence in
learninga crisis point when the longer and more arduous path of inquiry
must be chosen or abandonedwhich incites both resistance and attraction
as it comes into play. This means that we must pay attention to the essential
experience, avoiding definition merely in terms of skills without wishing in
any 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. It
involves more than a once-and-for-all self-definition since it is a manner of
living 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 education
may seek in association with other participants, but we each also have to make
it 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 explained
awaythe mystery of the human condition.
The question of the central experience of liberal education will bring with
it 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 sensible
response 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
be pursued in the midst of everything else, or it will not be pursued. If we are
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 43
not to be preoccupied with transitory events, with the temporal succession of
goings-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 from
the intrusive insistence of the practical life which gives it the appearance of
priority.
In speaking of an essential experience, we are forced to point to it in words
that are inadequate fully to capture or clarify what we are talking about, in
part 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 not
unfamiliar: we speak of evoking or encountering the transcendent. We
speak of transformation, of liberation from the here and now, of conver-
sion, of enlightenment, of the turning around of the soul as in Platos
allegory of the cave, of leading the examined life, of learning as intrinsically
good, 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 so
much 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 in
terms of a checklist of skills or books read, although such a person will have
skills and will have read good books, but we can and do recognize such per-
sons. Definitions, however necessary for some purposes, cannot substitute for
the 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 essential
experience of liberal arts education even while trying to defend it. I do not
think we can avoid this difficulty; it is, rather, a recurring predicament well
known 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 of
education in terms of their distinguishing characteristics, including an essay
on 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, is
the 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 things
before one has anything significant to say. Vocational education is acquiring
one or more skills to perform tasks of current interest and value in ones soci-
ety. Professional training involves the acquisition of skills and techniques at an
44 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
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, Oakeshott
offered 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 not
those of assertion and denial but the conversational relationships of acknowl-
edgment and accommodation (187). University education is where we learn
to recognize ourselves in the mirror of this civilization (188). University edu-
cation provides, Socratically, for teaching people how to be ignorant . . . the
important recognition of something absent (192). University education is
education in languages rather than literatures, explanatory not prescriptive
languages (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, reissuing
and reinvesting intellectual capital. In principle, it works undistracted by prac-
tical concerns (194). It is a manifold of different intellectual activities, a
conversation 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 different
disciplinary voices as the indirect approach to the quest for wisdom. The quest
for 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 saying
this, he meant, among other things, to say that we are human beings and must
remain so, and we are most human when we are disclosing to each other in
conversation what we understand about ourselves and the world. He also meant
that anxiety for the future robs us of the enjoyment of the present. Liberal
learning is a liberation from the here and now, from mere temporality. To
present ones view is to invite response in hope of conversation. It is when we
pass into politics that conversation becomes an argument or debate wherein
the 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
of the most common features of contemporary university life, constructing a
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 45
mission statement or strategic plan: This assumes that there is something
called 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 to
make 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 of
human 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 and
ignorance, and it may even be lost. But, it is only by exploring this sort of
knowledge (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 university
which must be grasped and which establishes the universitys reason for being.
The strategic plan and the mission statement almost always tempt us to look
outside of the institution itself for a direction, a direction which is not neces-
sarily grounded in, even perhaps contradictory to, the university experience
itself, 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. The
sort 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 life
displayed in an historic culture of remarkable splendour and lucidity and with
the 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 descent
into relevance, but the real threat to liberal learning is not relevance alone
but the belief that
relevance demands that every learner should be recognized as nothing but a
role-performer in a so-called social system and the consequent surrender of learn-
ing (which is the concern of individual persons) to socialization: the doctrine
that 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 most
insidious of all corruptions. It not only strikes at the heart of liberal learning, it
portends the abolition of man.
14
46 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
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 liberated
also from an immediate concern with anything specific to be learned. Learning
here 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 abstract
aptitudes; 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 of
thought 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 a
culture, but so anxious that everything shall receive mention that it can afford no
more than a fleeting glimpse of anything in particular. Here learning amounts to
little more than recognition; it never achieves the level of an encounter. It is the
vague 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 with
Oakeshott 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 its
alleged antiquarian, outdated aristocratic (elitist) character. These are, I
think, refusals of the idea rather than the loss of it. If the experience is a
fundamental potentiality of being human, it can be neglected or resisted but
its possibility can never be absent from us.
What I would add is that the knowledge of this activity must be inspired by
the fundamental experience which this manner of activity has always sought
to 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 a
university is a special manner of engaging in the pursuit of learning. It is a
corporate 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, meeting
occasionally 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 we
omitted to think of it as a place. A university, moreover, is a home of learning,
a place where a tradition of learning is preserved and extended, and where
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 47
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 of
learning.
One might summarize Oakeshotts outlook, first, by noting the emphasis
on restoring or reestablishing an inheritance and, in so doing, rejuvenating it
by appropriating that inheritance to our use. Such a resource is not oppressive
but a ground indispensable to the meaningful exercise of our own intellectual
agency. 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 university
preserves its inheritance in the using of it, which, inevitably, fosters the emer-
gence of new possibilities, not mere repetition. Traditions are not static; they
are complex arrays of interrelated voices often in tension. Conversation is often
overtaken 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 policy
became more prominent in the university curriculum, the temptation would
grow 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 so
long as it is the philosophical and historical study of politics, aiming to identify
and explain the defining characteristics of politics rather than constructing
defenses 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 as
a university studies things; studies in the university should not be shaped by
the 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 political
activity. What he rejected was such study of politics as suggests the insatiable
curiosity of a concierge. . . . A spurious academic focus for whatever political
interest there might be about.
17
Oakeshott also warns against putting too much
reliance on reading of the Great Books, the warning being not against the
books themselveswhich he certainly read deeply and admiredbut against
a certain kind of reading: as a mixture between the manner in which one
might read an out-of-date textbook on naval architecture and the manner in
which one might study a current election manifesto; obviously thinking of his
own experience, he warns against being alive only to the political quaintness
48 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
(or enormity) of these books which narrowed attention down to listening
either for the political faux pas or 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 the
other hand, one must suspend criticism in respect of assumptions that move
ones action in the worldhere triumph is necessarily sought.
The university is the place where practical concerns are not paramount and
where 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 explicitly
committed 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 a
condition of things but only with a manner of explanation, and of recognizing
that the only thing that matters in a philosophic argument is its coherence, its
intelligibility, its power to illuminate and its fertility.
19
The question will be posed: Are not we dwellers in places of learning in a
desperate situation which requires us to set aside these scruples and accept
the 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 the
universitys 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 place
of learning persists through the temporal succession of political events, rec-
ognizing aspects of the human situation that transcend politics. We in our
time are not special cases whose urgencies are cosmic exceptions to what other
human 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 of
learning), 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 not
to 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
modern liberalism. He describes that situation in Natural Right and History:
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 49
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 natural
right, 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 friend
of democracy:
We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends
and 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 cannot
forget 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 our
garden 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 are
indeed compelled to become specialists, but we can try to specialize in the most
weighty 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 explicit
threat to citizens souls than does Oakeshott, and he does not adopt the strict
separation of liberal learning from the practical life which characterizes
Oakeshotts approach; he wishes to foster the best that liberal democracy can
be. But what is common to both Strauss and Oakeshott, in this regard, is the
conviction that it is the independent vocation of liberal education to maintain
that sense of inquiry without which the full flourishing of the human spirit is
truncated.
Strausss outposts salutary to the republic obviously include what Oakeshott
calls places of learning. Because the animating spirit of education has be-
come difficult to discern, the way in which such institutions are salutary is
obscured. 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 Newmans
Church. 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 looks
up in search of the eternal order, all human things and all human concerns reveal
themselves to him in all clarity as paltry and ephemeral. . . . Chiefly concerned
with eternal beings, or the ideas, and hence also with the idea of man, he is as
unconcerned 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 all
individual human beings and their historical procession.
22
The quest for wisdom is a quest for the eternal or permanent things, for the
50 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
whole. Strausss emphasis, Socratically inspired, is on the seeking rather than
on conclusions or doctrines. Nor does Oakeshotts conversation exclude that
quest, even though it remains reticent (as does Strausss seeking) about the
source which ultimately stimulates the quest. At the same time, for Newman,
Oakeshott, and Strauss, it is the interaction and mutual examination of the
modes of knowing that preserve the possibility of such a quest, constraining
our tendency to exclusionary, specialized learning in a putative division of
academic labor.
If to comprehend any particular activity one must seek the distinguishing
idea of that activity, the quest is not confined to collecting instances (is not
simply 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 we
are considering, distinguishes liberal education as such. This calls into ques-
tion the attempts in our time to liken education to an industry or a business
enterprise or a policy think-tank. Like Newman and Oakeshott, Strauss un-
derstands that the question of the eternal implies the limited usefulness of a
merely historical inquiry into what liberal learning has been in its numerous
instantiations. Oakeshott argues for the historical understanding of politics
along with the philosophical. But he does not do so because he thinks the
historical understanding is preeminent. Rather, he sees that historical studies
have emerged as a distinctive aspect of the modern university with a set of
identifiable canons for historical research. There is much to be learned from
them, but to allow them to dominate the voice of philosophy (or of science
and mathematics) would be to end the conversation in which we attend to
the 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, Is
this sort of inquiry in a suitable condition to be a university study? And, Is this
a 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 be
uncomfortable that there is not a predetermined or functional definition of
the university. There are those who will be offended by the thought that the
university is not practically accountable. But they ought to consider that, in a
battle of conflicting definitions, competing functions, and interests, the re-
source of the university tradition itself will be obscured and finally lost if it is
expected to define an answer once and for all. At the same time, this approach
does not deem change a good thing in and of itself; the university is not for
the satisfaction of neophilia.
Furthermore, Strauss argues that the precondition for the quest for wisdom
is to open oneself to self-transcendence, getting beyond preoccupation with
oneself. The transcendence of the self is elicited through Socratic dialectic,
through Oakeshottian conversation, through Newmans mutual adjustment
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 51
of the disciplines to each other, and the theological reminder of the unity of
creation which transcends the particularity and limits of the various disciplines.
The university is, in short, a collaborative community insofar as the members
have not lost sight of, or rejected response to, that impulse which gave rise to
places of learning in the first place, and which continues to distinguish them
from other important human institutions. The quest for knowledge and for
self-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 education
today 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 to
a kind of parochialism, and is not parochialism incompatible with the liberalism,
the generosity, the openmindedness, of liberal education? Our notion of liberal
education does not seem to fit an age which is aware of the fact that there is not the
culture of the human mind, but a variety of cultures.
23
Every comprehensive view is seen or experienced as a particular perspective
over against other perspectives which claim comprehensiveness. We can, of
course, insist on our perspective because it is ours, and because we think it is
true, 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 more
than local significance. We must not be ignorant of that to which we must
respond. At the same time, if we are to defend what is ours, we also had better
have a clear idea of the substance of what is ours. Strauss thus defended the
great books as an essential element in gaining the desired clarity. In them can
be found the elements of a proper critique of the unexamined assumptions of
our 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 without
spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart. Liberal education is the ladder by
which 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 democracy
who 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 an
affinity with the writers of The Federalist and the author of Democracy 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 denying
the fact that ours is an age of conflicting worldviews, nor is he suggesting that
there is an obvious way out of it, but he is suggesting that there is an argument
52 Academic Questions / Winter 200304
to be taken up; we must not simply assume that the global conditions of our
time determine philosophic inquiry or the response we make. If we would
have ears to hear, we will, in difficult circumstances, have to listen for uncom-
mon voices, the greatest minds:
Such men are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in the class-
room. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if
there is a single one alive in ones time. For all practical purposes, pupils, of what-
ever degree of proficiency, have access to the teachers who are not in turn pupils,
to the greatest minds, only through the great books. Liberal education will then
consist in studying with the proper care the great books which the greatest minds
have left behinda study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less
experienced pupils, including the beginners.
25
This is the liberation prepared for by liberal education. It is not principally a
political liberation because its intent is not to overthrow or radically alter the
political structure and culture of the democratic age. It is, to speak archaically
and thus pertinently, the liberation that comes with the ascent of the soul even
while remaining physically bound to the earthly things. Strauss is speaking of
what I have been calling the essential experience of liberal learning which we
are to look for in every age. In practice this means setting up, or protecting
already set up, outposts of learning salutary for the democratic republic.
If we then consider what Strauss has been saying overall, we see at least two
obligations: One is to go in search of the eternal things and the whole; the
other is to consider our vocation toward that polity which currently has the
responsibility to support and maintain the places where we can safely pursue
liberal learning. Liberal learning and liberal society are not identical. But they
can be friends because there is a disposition to openness in the liberal society
which is opportune for, indeed encourages, the serious seeker of wisdom, the
pursuer of learning what is most important. That very openness, however, has
an inclination to slide into massness and vulgarity, to fail to recognize the
salutary critique of a true friend who is not merely a facilitator. The first of
these undertakingsto seek the highest thingsguides the secondto be-
friend society according to what it needs as seen from the vantage point of the
highest thingsand thus suggests that the pursuit of wisdom is prior to the
idea of the university, imparting to the latter its animating spirit, and thereaf-
ter becoming the resource for recalling to mind what it was that we sought in
establishing places of learning, the salutary outposts. Liberal learning is bold
in philosophy and modest in politics.
From these reflections, one can conclude that the idea of the university, of
the place of learning, is constituted in response to its animating experience.
Whatever the instantiations in actual institutions of higher learning, however
much in practice those institutions may vary, this is what binds them together.
Newman, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Fuller 53
This is what allows the possibility of distinguishing liberal learning from other
sorts of learning, establishing the peculiar relevance of places of learning or
salutary outposts to the larger societies of which they are a part. That they
are, 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 Image
Books, 1959), 127. Page-numbers of subsequent quotations from this book will be cited
in the text.
2. Mark Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (New York
and 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.