The Educated Man

If we judge by usage, “education” is one of those terms that obeys Humpty Dumpty’s semiotic principle, for it seems to mean what anyone wishes it to mean. For that reason the first part of this essay will be taken up with a bit of dictionary work. But the essay will not be devoted merely to verbal analysis. The verbal distinctions that must be undertaken are ancillary to the substantive elucidations that I hope to accomplish. I would like to begin by distinguishing two different processes that human beings can and that, in a utopia, everyone would undergo: the process of training and that of education.

But before taking up this distinction two prefatory remarks are necessary. The first is that I shall address myself to the problem of the education and training of the intellect, the mind, to the problem, that is, of conceptual or of purely verbal or book education and training, and not to questions that arise from any other kind of education and training. But I do not assume that intellectual education and training are the only kinds there are. Living in a world of books, in an entirely verbal or conceptual world, academic people tend to fall into the fundamental error of believing in the primacy of the concept, as we might call it. This error guides us in the teaching of literature and the arts. But this is not the occasion to dwell on this matter. The second prefatory remark is this: I do not claim that the distinction between training and education that shall occupy us is a novelty discovered by me. If I had discovered it I would be suspicious of it. But old as our awareness of the distinction is, we must dwell on it because many of the fundamental difficulties in education from which we have been suffering for over half a century are fertilized and mulched by the confusion between training and education.

To train is to inculcate a skill, and usually it refers to the inculcation of physical or manipulative skills. A plumber or an automobile mechanic is trained for his work; and if someone says of him that he is an educated man we take the speaker to mean that besides his skill as a plumber or mechanic he is a man who reads in some field or fields and has acquired something besides competence in his trade.

However, a difficulty arises immediately when we ask whether an engineer, an internist, a solid state physicist, or an Elizabethan scholar is an educated man. A libertarian in matters of language—and I am to some extent one—would merely point out that usage permits the application of the term “education” to these experts. Ordinarily there can be no objection to such usage. Of course a distinguished surgeon or physicist is an educated man in a perfectly legitimate sense of the term.

I imagine that we apply the term “education” to the professions because it is assumed that a higher kind of intelligence is involved in their practice than in the trades, and no one would wish to deny this assumption. In any case, the notion that human activities can be arranged in an order of rank is a true one and not one that can be done away with by an egalitarianism, however intransigent. But we should consider, nevertheless, that our educational institutions are today producing not educated but trained men, although I am perfectly aware of the fact that the successful training required in the professions demands a kind of intellect that the plumber, if he has it, does not use in his trade. We should consider the matter, not in order to derogate from the products of our graduate schools but, again, in order to elucidate the important distinction that I have suggested.

In the pursuit of an education the quarrel between the sciences and the humanities, so much discussed since the publication of Sir Charles Snow’s unfortunate Rede lecture, is not one to which we need pay attention. The notion, old hat before the publication of the lecture, that we could solve our educational problems if we could throw a bridge, with two-way traffic, between the two “cultures” is simplistic and false. It must be acknowledged, however, that the abysmal ignorance of the sciences one runs into on the part of people with Ph.D.s in the humanities is as lamentable as it is appalling. Of course the ignorance of the humanities on the part of scientists is no less abysmal. But lamentable as is this ignorance, the problem of the so-called two cultures is irrelevant to our purposes. For if we forget the labels that we apply to the two distinct uses of the mind in the cultivation of the humanities and the sciences, we are able to see immediately that both kinds of activities are human activities, that both are also humane activities, demanding perhaps different mental talents, but each as profoundly human and humane as the other. In any case, for us at least, the important point is that what our educational institutions impart in either area is training. And if the graduate student, dissatisfied with the training he gets, undertakes to acquire an education, he is soon in trouble with his major professor.

We know that trades admit only of training whereas the professions offer bases from which men may begin to educate themselves. But while it is not improper to speak of an educated Elizabethan scholar, it is simply lazy thinking to assume that he is educated because of the important contributions he has made to his field of competence. Why isn’t the specialist an educated man, and what would he have to do to be one? The reason the specialist is not an educated man is that, given the immense amount of knowledge he has to master even in the smallest corner of a discipline, he simply has no time for an education today. There are other complex reasons. But the fact is that for good and bad reasons, specialization dominates our graduate programs.

What then would a man have to have to be an educated man? There are several ways of answering this question. Newman puts it in his cadenced prose so well that the temptation to quote him is irresistible: “Our desideratum is,” he says in the Preface to The Idea of a University, “not the habits and manners of gentlemen . . . but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.” And less than a page later, in passing, he writes that a properly trained and formed intellect is able to have a connected view or grasp of things. In these statements I would emphasize the term “comprehensive” and the phrase “connected view or grasp of things.” It is then not learning alone that makes an educated man. Hobbes said that if he had read as many books as the professors he would know as little as they did. Learning is required, indeed a good deal of it is required today, when the darkness is being rolled back as fast as it is at all the points of the compass. But it is what we do with learning and what learning does to us and for us that gives it its chief value, and thus distinguishes the educated man from the merely well-trained specialist: “its chief value,” because it would not do to deny that there is value in mere knowledge, even in the essentially sterile knowledge of the quiz-kid type. But the chief value of knowledge consists in our use of it. And, of course, I do not mean the practical use of it. I mean the use of knowledge to give us the comprehensiveness and versatility of mind that leads us to a connected view or grasp of things. Let me express it in my own terms: The educated man is a man who has a defensible view of his relations to his fellows and, as a consequence, of his relations to himself, who has a view of the relation of man to the world, including the ultimate mystery on which the world is grounded. Without such a view a man may be most learned. But there is a difference between him and the man who has such a view.

But let us not quarrel about terms. If anyone should prefer to use the term “education” in a broader and less demanding sense there is no reasonable means of preventing him from so doing. But it is no less reasonable, on the other hand, to insist that there is a vast and most important difference in fact between what he calls an educated man and what I suggest we call him.

The difference lies in the lack of breadth of the mere specialist, the narrowness of outlook, and in many defects of intellect and character that flow from this central defect. Not that the specialist lacks opinions on many subjects. But that his opinions are not worth much. We are all acquainted with superb specialists who entertain opinions on subjects on which they are basically ignorant—opinions often held with tenacity, but to which they have no more right than I have to opinions on the nature of quasars and the receding universe. The educated man is able to relate his own expert knowledge to knowledge in other fields. His knowledge of other fields is perforce second-hand, but it can be responsible. And thus he is able to comprehend the totality of human culture within nature and nature itself within the darkness and the mystery of which it is the luminous crest. He may be a specialist in Elizabethan literature, Patristics, or Sumerian archaeology. But his specialized knowledge is placed in a framework of interests that relates it to man’s adventure in history and, if he has a ground for believing in it, to his cosmic destiny. I say “if he has a ground for believing in it” because it would be a bigoted man who would assert today that anyone who rejected the problem of human destiny as meaningless would, by that rejection, debar himself from the ranks of the educated. Those who deny the significance of the problem seem to me to condemn themselves to live in a shriveled world, a world lacking the resonance needed to give it rich value. They are, as I think of them, the lower-case positivists, men who strip themselves of much that is needed to be complete human beings. But if they espouse these shriveling beliefs as the result of thoughtful facing of what they take to be compelling relevant data, and not as part of the unexamined orthodoxy of their age, it would be sheer dogmatism to assert that they lack an education.

It is thus not difficult to see that the knowledge of the man I have chosen to call “merely trained” is incomplete as well as insulated and that therefore the trained man cannot properly raise the question as to the objective or purpose of his own activity. Merely to raise that question he would have to be able to relate his specialized knowledge to other areas of knowledge and to other activities, which is to say that he would have to be able to tear off the insulation that specialization naturally wraps around itself and he would have to make a more or less serious exploration of activities, interests, disciplines, and concerns beyond his field of specialization. But if he is an educated man, these explorations are made with due diffidence.

A sense of our relation to our fellows and hence to ourselves and to the universe, in order to be adequate, demands a grasp of the temporal perspective and of our place in it. Otherwise stated it demands not only knowledge of our history but of the values of our traditions. History no doubt is today a flourishing discipline. But we are a generation of secular chiliasts: men whose piety is elicited by the glories of the promised land and not by the values of our great traditions. Nor is it paradoxical that our historians fail to deepen our historical sense. Just as we must draw a distinction between the philosophical mind and the philosopher’s mind, so we must draw a distinction between the historical mind and the historian’s mind. In the great writers, of course, the two are one. But not always in the lesser lights.

At this point I can hear some of my readers objecting to this idea of the educated man for the following reason: For you, they say, an educated man is a philosopher. He is a man who has theories about himself and about the world. That means that an alert, well-equipped, finely developed mind that is not at home in the abstractions so dear to the philosopher cannot be educated. Your definition excludes too many people who by common consent would be included in the ranks of the educated. To this objection two answers need be made. The first is that I have already pointed out that I was confining my remarks to intellectual or verbal education. But it cannot be held that this is the only means by which our humanity can be brought to flower. The second is that while education, in the sense I have described it, is indeed the acquisition of a conceptual grasp of the sweep of human existence and its place in the universe, a conceptual grasp need not be a “philosophical” grasp, in the sense in which the word “philosophy” is used in our universities. The educated man may have a merely mythic conception of the world or he may have a partly quasi-scientific, partly philosophical or theoretical picture of himself and his world. Otherwise I would be forced to deny that an ancient Egyptian or Mayan or Peruvian priest could have been educated, and that only the fortunate denizens of certain civilizations could be. And such a denial would seem to me to be so narrow that it would open the man who made it to the charge that he lacked the very form of development he was discussing.

A picture of the world, and one which is his own, is the mark of the educated man. And if a man lacks it he is forced to accept the incomplete, incoherent, uncritical notions current in his world about himself and the nature of things. The process of education places a man beyond such a muddle. The educated man holds responsible views, he is aware of their weaknesses and their strengths, he knows which of them are held on trust and which are held on the authority of reason. The mind of the educated man is a broad mind but above all it is his own. His is an authentic mind, which is to say that it is a mind whose content is the product of his own effort to arrive at a satisfactory grasp of the nature of things. I use the word “authentic” reluctantly, since it has been kidnapped by the existentialists and I intend it, as indicated, in a sense close to its etymological sense. Again, the educated man is a free man, he is not dogmatic, he is not given to certainties that he does not have a right to have (and who, in our world, has a right to certainties?) and when he reaches a conclusion, as perforce he must, he accepts it, in Plato’s phrase, “with a hesitating trust in human reason.”

The educated man is a man capable of growth. Education is not a static condition or state of affairs that, once being achieved, is possessed once and for all, as one possesses a car for which one has paid in full. To achieve an education there are no specifically defined requirements, no mastery of specific disciplines and, above all, no terminal points.

I have assumed, and perhaps it is advisable to make the assumption explicit, that the educated man represents one mode of human excellence. Let me iterate that there are other forms of excellence. But one form to which our civilization from its very beginning has given major recognition is that achieved by the educated man. I do not believe however that this mode of excellence can be pursued for the sake of excellence. Like happiness, the best way to miss it is to pursue it directly. What an educated man pursues is a cognitive mastery of his relation to his fellows and hence to himself and to the universe. Pursuing such mastery seriously he achieves the excellence of education as a by-product. The man who seeks excellence for the sake of excellence is a narcissist and what he achieves is the offensive habit of exhibitionism.

Have I been all along, some of my readers may wonder, disparaging specialization? Not at all. Today we cannot do without it. The world would be better if great physicians were educated. But aside from the fact that they do not have the time to be educated, when I go to my general practitioner I go trusting that he is a competent specialist. And when we trust our generals and our engineers and sanitation experts, the navigator of a ship or plane, no less than a bus driver, we trust them because we take them to be specialists. Today, at any rate, a world of amateurs is inconceivable. Or rather, in the hands of amateurs our world would soon come to a catastrophic end. Nor could such a world ever have existed at the civilized plane. For, as Friedrich Hayek has pointed out, “It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.” It follows that civilization involves specialization. We tend to think of aristocratic societies as societies of amateurs. And in certain respects they were. But your aristocrat was a specialist in at least three areas: he knew how to use and keep power, he knew how to fight, and he was an expert in the beauty of women and the excellence of horses.

It has been said that education cannot be achieved without a specialized command of one field. This at least is how I understand Whitehead when in one of his essays on education he writes that “the appreciation of the structure of ideas is the side of a cultured mind which can only grow under the influence of a special study.” And he continues, “I mean the eye for the whole chessboard, for the bearing of one set of ideas on another.” If by the eye for the whole chessboard Whitehead means, as I take him to mean, that the influence of a special study gives one what Newman called comprehensiveness and versatility of intellect, a connected view or grasp of things, I am forced to disagree with Whitehead. However we acquire it, we do not acquire it by the specialized study of Chaucer, the French Revolution, or genetics. Nor does specialized knowledge inculcate humility in the specialist toward disciplines or areas of interest of which he is ignorant. Stop and listen to distinguished specialists settling complex international problems, observe them base their opinions, with which they are well pleased, on tendentious information gathered from newspapers, see them resolve difficult social problems that demand for their elementary understanding a great deal of specialized knowledge of facts that they do not possess, see how they follow the flock together, happy to be with their kind, happy to think with the group, happy to be comforted by the feeling that they belong. Having observed them, having noted with care the push of their unreasoning passion and their tendency to accept opinion and hearsay where facts are called for, ask yourself what is the value of the specialized knowledge these distinguished specialists possess. Ask, does their knowledge make them humble before what they do not know? Press the question: Do these specialists realize that in areas in which they lack the competence they have in their own field, they are opinionated and allow themselves the lazy luxury of entertaining unexamined dogmas which they would not permit an ignorant man to entertain in their own areas of competence? They may be diffident in areas of scientific or humanistic investigation. But on social, on political, and on economic questions—matters as technical as those of which they are masters, whether it be physics or the Eighteenth Century—they talk with the confidence of barbers and the self-assurance of politicians on the hustings.

Whitehead, however, did insist on one trait of the educated mind which is a necessary, although not a sufficient, characteristic of it. The educated man’s mind is alive with living and not with dead ideas. It shuns stereotypes, avoids rubber stamps; it thinks freshly, and what it absorbs it animates and transubstantiates. The educated man’s view of the world is his own. There was a time in our civilization when such a view could be borrowed from the dominant orthodoxy, which was an orthodoxy because it was dominant. Such a view could be made to fit the personality of the borrower and his circumstances. But where do we go for such a view today? Where, that we can defend our choice? In any case, to be able to defend the choice that he considers the right opinion one must be able to say that what he has borrowed is true. He cannot delegate that responsibility to any authority whatsoever. But to say that a given doctrine is true is to be able to examine it. And the examination, if honest, ends up by transforming and transubstantiating the doctrine. But ideas that are critically assimilated cease to be borrowed. Again, there is no education where there is ignorance. But ignorance has a way of concealing itself under stereotypes and clichés in such a way that those who entertain them do not recognize them for what they are. Unexamined ideas, the soggy mass of stereotypes that make up the mental content of most men, are not ideas—not at any rate ideas in the Leibnizian sense; they are automatic mental responses, solid counters. But an idea is not a cliche, it is a quick, living affair, expanding and contracting as it reaches out to other ideas or is pressed by them.

But it is not only what a man does with his learning that makes him an educated man but what that learning does to him and for him. What he does with his learning is to use it to expand, unify, and give precision and coherence to his vision of the world. Thus his learning “places” him in the universe, gives him a proper sense of his own finitude and his own grandeur and dignity, reveals to him where he stands in the light of knowledge and beyond it, in the encompassing darkness that he cannot penetrate. What his learning does for him is to liberate him, to free him from the superstitious ignorance of the learned, the pedantic and granitic insensibility of the bigoted, the intransigence and blurred myopic vision of the ignorant or the semi-ignorant.

Education is a process by which a man’s talents and aptitudes are brought to full flower. It constitutes, therefore, an increase and growth of his humanity in so far as that growth is allowed by his social environment and his physical equipment. But not only his intellectual capacities but his full endowment as a human being—his moral and aesthetic sensibility and his capacity for cosmic piety—should be drawn out by the process of education. And at this point I must briefly observe that our educational institutions, by and large, fail almost entirely in providing education. We train specialists and have lost the vision, which our ancestors once had, of the complete man—a man of formed moral character, aesthetic sensibility, religious capacity, and ample and broad knowledge.

For many reasons we teachers have abdicated almost entirely the responsibility of forming moral character. If a student stays out of the hands of the police and observes a few elementary rules of behavior on campus, we accept him if his intellectual capacities meet our standards. In our large educational factories—our celebrated pluriversities—besides rather elementary demands of scholarly honesty we are not concerned with the kind of person the student is. Cleverness, a verbal, a merely cerebral, talent is all we value. And little else. To keep out of the newspapers in connection with what we think of as unfavorable publicity—any unfavorable publicity, whether the activity that generates it is right, wrong, or neutral in value—is the full extent of the moral demands we make of our students. The development of their aesthetic sensibility we have some concern for. Whether what we undertake along these lines is or is not valuable I shall not consider. But our failure to make moral demands of our students is, when we ponder it, as alarming as it is an eloquent sign of the changes taking place in our society. Grant that moral education cannot be undertaken in college; still, moral demands we could make, thus showing our approval of excellence of character and thereby discouraging traits we recognize as deforming. Nor do we attempt to quicken the cosmic piety of the student. On the contrary, teachers today go out of their way to kill it in him, by the systematic inculcation of a shallow secularistic mentality that leaves the student “enlightened” with quotation marks about the term, and spiritually shriveled.

But kindly note what I am asserting. I do not maintain that we neglect the moral and religious education of our students. It is a question as to whether, by the time they come to us, they are still susceptible of receiving a moral and a religious education. What I am asserting is that we do not make moral demands of them.

It may be retorted that the training we undertake to impart is difficult enough and urgent enough, and that given the limited facilities and resources of our colleges and universities we cannot in reason be asked to do more than we do. I agree with the retort. But if this is the case, we must acknowledge that in our world education is becoming less and less possible to achieve. It was possible in a world moving more slowly than ours is, in which there was less to know, and in which what there was to know required fewer technical skills and talents than are required to achieve solid knowledge today. To put it briefly, it would be illusory to expect the proliferation among us not of polymaths of the stature of Leibniz but of men who aspired to his range of knowledge and in their measure achieved it. Today, among us, the specialist is king. It should be added that it would take a total revolution in our world before a change could be achieved—and I mean a revolution that would change radically the ethos of our society. The question would arise whether such a revolution would be possible and whether it would be desirable in view of the catastrophic and unforeseeable consequences that it would bring in its wake.

In any case, it is generally agreed that the knowledge that our students acquire by the training we provide is necessary, and it must be acknowledged that it is basic to education. Since students have their hands full doing what they are doing, we can hardly ask them to do more. Nor could they do it if they tried. Universities and colleges are institutions staffed by a body of bureaucrats, and education is not a process that can be institutionalized. It is an activity in which the individual must engage by himself. There are no degrees for the educated man; nor, as already noted, are there courses or programs that could achieve the end of education, nor is there a terminal point.

But could it not be urged that while at the graduate level training is what we must continue to aim for, at the undergraduate we should aim to impart a modicum of education? It would be desirable. And many excellent small colleges in the United States aim at the education of their students. But there are factors working against them, four of which we should review hastily. The first is that an ignorant youth cannot be educated, and students who come to college come very poorly trained. During their college years much of their teachers’ effort goes into supplying the deficiencies with which the students come to them. We do not fail in this job. But it is a job that colleges should not have to do. Quite obviously, with the present pressures colleges are in a position to make demands—not of the students but of the high schools. Whether we shall make use of the opportunity or not I am in no position to say.

The second reason education does not go on and cannot go on at the undergraduate level is that the undergraduate teacher is of course a product of the graduate schools. After a man has been properly trained, when he begins to teach undergraduates, what he does at the undergraduate level is to train the students. If he is a good scholar he is not likely to be an educated man. The fierce competition for distinguished staffs and the star system puts a premium on productive specialists. The growing specialization in science and technology sets the norm. Men in the humanities seek to imitate the sciences. The drive toward objective evaluation of the student’s accomplishment strengthens the processes of specialization. And the rapid increase in knowledge in any field leaves the serious scholar little time for browsing beyond his own field. The rapid enlargement of the staffs demanded today by an increasing college population adds to the drift. Men can be trained fast, but education is a slow process that cannot be sped up. There no doubt are other factors operating to strengthen the processes of specialization, but I have mentioned enough, I trust, to show that it is not a phenomenon that would yield easily to a decision to alter it.

The next reason education does not go on at the undergraduate level I have already mentioned: the process of education cannot be institutionalized, programmed, planned. And what cannot be programmed cannot be undertaken in American colleges and universities. Today matters have gone further. It used to be that what could not be programmed could not be undertaken. Of late what cannot be punched in a card cannot be undertaken. The number of credit hours and the course name can be punched. But education does not occur when requirements punched in the card have been fulfilled.

The fourth is difficult to broach, but it must be broached in spite of the fact that I am fully aware that there are many people who do not like to hear unpleasant truths. We claim that we value education, but what we really value is training—the professionalism that enables a man to succeed in a career. Education as I have used the term here we do not really value. And we do not value it because it is irrelevant to the activities our society expects its members to undertake. The world in which we live is a world of specialists. For specialists we have great use. But the educated man qua educated cannot be employed even by our educational institutions.

We must next ask: Are there not some subjects and disciplines that help lead a man toward the acquisition of an education? I answer that there may be some disciplines and skills that, pursued with a single mind, keep a man from an education; but I do not know any one that is the indispensable road toward an education or a guarantee of one. It is generally assumed that the humanities have this power. But a man merely trained in any one of the humanities is no more of an educated man than a man trained in banking or solid state physics. An expert cryptographer could wonder about the patterns of nature, their wonderful symmetry and harmony; and if he pursues that wonder he will sooner or later be involved in the process of enlarging the range of his interest and the depth of his humanity. On the contrary, a man trained in literature need not ever abandon his trained bias. The assumption that the cultivation of any one of the humanities or any number of them will lead a man to become educated ignores the distinction I am making between training and education. It is not the kind of knowledge a man possesses, as already observed, that makes him an educated man but what that knowledge does to him and what he does with it.

If what I have just said holds, it is desirable to expatiate on it in the light of the claims that are sometimes made for the humanities. I shall make my observations by commenting on a quotation from an article based on a Phi Beta Kappa address entitled “What We Live By,” given recently by Professor Franklin B. Krauss at Pennsylvania State University.¹ Professor Krauss writes:

The humanities are the written repository of the total experience of Western man as stated by writers of superlative literary skill. They are uniquely what they are and therefore cannot be duplicated in any other area of study. To dismiss them as interesting but unessential in contemporary education is to turn one’s back completely and indifferently on the explanation of who we are and what we are, as well as on the contemplation of who and what we might become. The multiplication of ingenious machines and of mechanical techniques may improve man’s physical condition and surroundings, but the humanities are indispensable to the maintenance of active, moral motivation in all phases of civilized society. This conviction is what we live by.

One could write a longer essay than that of Professor Krauss as a commentary on this short paragraph. I shall take up only some of Professor Krauss’s statements. But it is desirable to preface my remarks with a statement of full agreement with Professor Krauss when he tells us that the humanities are unique and therefore cannot be duplicated in any other area of study. I disagree with him about their function, but this is no place in which to reiterate what is to be found under my signature elsewhere.

It is necessary to indicate that the paragraph quoted is the closing paragraph of the essay. Had we heard it as the peroration of the original address we would have had to make allowances for the vague and overblown claims made for the humanities. By means of a peroration an orator seeks to leave the audience in a state of fervid admiration or contempt for that which he admires or despises. But Mr. Krauss’s levitated encomium is presented in the last paragraph of an essay and it must be judged, not on its quality as the elevated, closing words of a “speech”—a word that often carries with it an unpleasant redolence—but on the quality of the argument.

Let us turn to some of the assertions. Is the statement that the humanities are the repository of the experience of Western man accurate? It suggests to the hasty reader that they are not the repository of the experience of Eastern man or that the humanities have not been cultivated in the East. I am confident that Mr. Krauss had no such stricture in mind. But of Caesar’s wife . . . —the faintest suggestion of unlovely parochialism is unworthy of the breadth we expect of a man who cultivates the humanities. Let us ask, next, whether the humanities are the repository of the total experience of man. I must remind the reader that the claim is similar to one made by Allen Tate in a deservedly well-known essay entitled “The Present Function of Criticism.” Mr. Tate asserts: “Literature is the complete knowledge of man’s experience, and by knowledge I mean that unique and formed intelligence of the world of which man alone is capable.” I do not mention Mr. Tate’s essay to suggest a debt on the part of Mr. Krauss to the poet-critic. I mention it to use both claims as bases on which to ground the comment that they bespeak a drastically narrow notion of what makes up the complete or total experience of man. For aren’t scientific treatises and papers the repositories of part, and of an important part, of the experience of man? Surely cultures in which science has flourished have provided men with one means of achieving one kind of excellence for which the cultivation of the humanities is no substitute.

The assertion that the humanities are the repositories of the total or complete experience of man may be called scientism in reverse. The statement that the humanities embody an explanation of who we are and what we are is not only another instance of scientism in reverse but a most dubious notion, either involving the misuse of the term “explanation” or making the common but radical error of thinking that they serve as a substitute for science. Mr. Krauss rightly asserts that for the humanities there is no substitute; but he believes that for science there is. To some of us it seems that to use the term “explanation” in connection with the humanities constitutes an unbuttoned use of language that a man who cultivates the humanities should not permit himself. The assertion that the humanities enable us to contemplate who and what we might become calls for qualification. They surely must be included in such a contemplation; and when they are not, the results are the vulgarities and naïvetés of Walden Two. But to achieve an adequate idea of who and what we might become we need not only the wisdom that the humanities are supposed to, and sometimes indeed do, provide us with, but also knowledge of the sciences, starting from biology if not from physics, and going all the way to the quasi-sciences of man, to those disciplines that we may call (adapting to my use a term borrowed from the Continent) “philosophical anthropology.” And among these we must include psychology, for we cannot exclude it simply because of the vulgar misuse to which it has been put by an enthusiastic would-be novelist, the coarseness of whose superior mind struggles for first place with his naïve, pretentiously naïve, feeble grasp of the nature of burdened humanity.

In this connection it is not irrelevant to note that it is not only the soi-disant “humanists” of our day who ignore science. They have good precedent, for even the Prince of Humanists did also. At a time when the nascent modern science and philosophy were beginning to stir the adventurous minds of Europe, Erasmus, who hated the regnant scholasticism, totally ignored them.

The thesis, finally, that the humanities are indispensable to the maintenance of active, moral motivation in all phases of civilized society is one that cannot be certified as truth by mere assertion. We are confronted with a socio-historical hypothesis, and one therefore that calls for scrupulous examination, a hypothesis that must be tested in the very same manner that empirical hypotheses are tested. Plausible as the hypothesis no doubt appears, I suggest that we consider with care whether it be the expression of generous hope or the statement of sober fact.

It is no doubt true that the multiplication of ingenious machines and of mechanical techniques has so far led ostensibly to the improvement of man’s physical condition and surroundings (as it has also led, often, to the worsening of them). But am I rash in pointing out the need for asking ourselves whether the contemptuous reference to machines and techniques does not involve also a touch of what we may call Erewhonian negativism? In Butler the attitude is delightful and its half-truths are not the proper object of serious criticism. Intended seriously, as D. H. Lawrence often intended it, and as our writer seems to intend it, this negativism is—well, it is, to put it kindly, inadmissible. For what would we be today had not machinery and techniques made our civilization possible? How would Mr. Krauss’s challenging essay have been circulated before the invention of the printing press? And what would science be without the machinery and techniques employed by such men as the lens grinder of Amsterdam and those of Palomar? The glories of the seventeenth century and the magnificent achievements piled on since then, where would they be? But let that go. What cannot be ignored is that by pitting the humanities against machines and techniques our writer achieves too easy a victory for the superiority of the former. Why did he not contrast them to science?

The failure to select worthy terms of contrast forces me to say, with as much courtesy as I can summon to my aid, that the tactics of such contrast ill befits a free and humane mind. This is not what a “humanist” in our day stands for at his best. But unfortunately “humanists” all too often strike the pose of superior spirituality and in so doing are ingrate and supercilious toward ingenious machines and mechanical techniques. Without machines and techniques there could be no spirituality. Erasmus needed quills and ink and paper, and of course he used the ingenious machine invented by Gutenberg. And we, today, who cultivate the humanities, need a vast industry for the production and propagation of our levitated spirituality.

What is the value of an education? I have already suggested the answer I give this question. But let me make the suggestion fully explicit. Education is one way of achieving human excellence. Not the only way; and a person who does not see there are others can hardly be called an educated man. But there is one kind of human excellence, the excellence of the man who has a defensible grasp of the nature of things and of his place in it, that is particularly valuable, if it is valuable to develop our capacity for understanding and knowledge. This excellence when possessed leads to others, and above all to liberation. Liberation from what? From narrowness, bigotry, dogmatism, the myopia of the provincial. It is repetitious, but it needs to be said again that the educated man has a sense of the dubieties that make up the texture of human living; he sees the certainties at which he has arrived against the background of other certainties that compete with his own and contradict them. Ideally, education leads to the irenic temperament; it loosens the ties with the parish; it makes for a catholic attitude with a small “c.”

Because of the high value that education has, it is gratifying to observe that the system—the educational machinery with its efficient bureaucracy, its clerks, its punch cards, and the rest of its wonderful equipment—is often defeated by the student and that the number of students who in spite of us teachers seek an education tells us something not only about the inefficiency of our arrangements but also about the depth of man’s need to become fully a man. When the student undertakes to become educated few of us refuse in our hearts encouragement and approval to the rebel—although some of us warn him of the risks he is taking while hoping that he will continue to take them. Since what he undertakes is an almost illegal or, at any rate, paralegal operation, we have no statistics about it. We know to the third decimal point how many B.A.s and M.A.s and Ph.D.s are turned out every year in the United States. How many educated men get by in spite of the system we do not know. But more, we may be sure, than the system, if it were totally efficient, would allow.

A professor conveys a sense of a wider horizon and of the wonders beyond the shore of his own restricted field. He knows, because he has visited some of the islands out there. The student somehow glimpses what the older man has seen, and a restlessness takes hold of him, and before long he takes off in his own skiff with little direction but with an impatience that makes the older man smile in admiration and hope, and that possibly awakens deep nostalgia for a happiness he cannot again know. Let me repeat what I have said somewhere else:

A young man comes into your class on a lovely day in the fall and after the lecture . . . asks an unusually intelligent question. . . . You keep your eye on him and maybe talk with him in the office now and then. Gradually he begins to come in for a chat fairly regularly. As you get to know him you begin to realize that he is not yet quite himself and he knows it. Suddenly, by a miracle—yes, it is a miracle— . . . he tips in the womb of nescience and you sense more than see that he has begun to make his painful, groping and wonderfully thrilling way to the light, a light that, after he reaches it, he will call his real world. He has taken his first steps in becoming a fully developed person.

I also said that a teacher who stands by when a student begins to take his first steps toward an education goes through the supreme experience of his teaching life. But while such miracles occur in our educational institutions, the system is not designed to encourage them to happen. And it often penalizes those who undertake such out-of-the-way experiments. Education takes place in our system but it takes place in spite of the system.

It would be unfair not to observe that our institutions of higher learning have good reasons for fearing education and for doing what they decently can to ignore the problem that education poses to them. Ours is a technological society, and not only in the ordinary sense that Jacques Ellul uses the term: a society dedicated to the use of rational means toward clearly defined ends. In such a society the specialist is at a premium and for the educated man the society sees no use. Besides, the educated man is not easily distinguished from the superficial amateur with his unreliable knowledge and his intellectual irresponsibility. One thing we know from the study of anthropology and should know from our study of history is that societies institutionalize diverse values, organizing them in diverse orders of rank. The values and the institutions that anchor them are what we call cultures. In a technological culture there is no use for the mind that is comprehensive and versatile and whose central drive is to gain a connected view or grasp of things.

I said at the beginning of this paper that I did not claim to have discovered the distinction between education and training. Teachers and educational administrators have been considering it from different points of view for quite some time. The never-ending discussion we teachers seem to be engaged in about the curriculum, our concern that students of the sciences get acquainted with the nature and value of the humanities and that students of the humanities gain some knowledge of the place of science in our world and of its powerful methods, the vague sense we have that what we are doing may not be worth doing—this is all evidence of our radical dissatisfaction with the specialized products of our schools. And I beg to be permitted to say in passing that this paper was already in its final shape when Professor William Arrowsmith’s challenging article, “The Shame of the Graduate Schools,” in the March 1966 issue of Harper’s magazine came into my hands. Professor Arrowsmith’s attack is on the teaching of the humanities, and I do not believe that it can be re-aimed, by a shift of angle, to the quarter where the sciences are entrenched. In any case, I am in deep sympathy with many of the criticisms of Professor Arrowsmith. The point at which I disagree radically is with Professor Arrowsmith’s optimism. Had he placed the graduate schools in their historical and their social perspective he might have gained considerably more understanding of our plight than he seems to have. It bears iteration: the condition of our schools could only be changed by means of a radical revolution—a revolution that would blast the foundations of our society.

When the problem is formulated in historical terms and in terms of the dominant ethos of our society and the existing arrangements of our educational institutions, it does not yet fully disclose its nature. This is disclosed when we express it in terms of our need, as human beings, to achieve the maximum development possible within the enabling frame of our culture. It follows therefore that the problem cannot be solved in the absence of a fully developed philosophical anthropology. And of course the latter, given the present condition in the sciences of man, is nowhere in sight.

It must be acknowledged that for the day-to-day process of living, facing the task of merely staying afloat, education, as I have sketched it, is irrelevant. But it must also be acknowledged that until we devise some sort of solution to the problem of education, our society will be able to continue its triumphant technological development, but it will deprive itself of the possession of as many complete human beings as it might otherwise have.

Eliseo Vivas was a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University.