The Examined Life

Ignorance is not the only thing from which a true liberal education frees us

Those of us who teach or study at American colleges and universities are facing the academic year that is about to begin with more than a little trepidation. Will there be protests? Encampments? The occupation of buildings? The invasion of classrooms? Riots?

The fact that we are asking those questions should itself prompt us to ask a more fundamental question:  What is the purpose of higher education?

Most American colleges and universities proclaim themselves to be providers of “liberal education” (or “liberal arts education”). But what does that mean? Why should students want it? Why should their parents pay—a lot—for them to get it?

The word “liberal” in this context means “freeing.” So, what is it that liberal education is supposed to be freeing us from?

An obvious answer is that liberal education frees us from ignorance. A liberally educated person knows some things—some things worth knowing—about, for example, history, philosophy, literature, politics, economics, religion, civics, art, music, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

Liberal education is valuable in part because knowing the truth in these domains of inquiry is intrinsically desirable, and ignorance is inherently undesirable.

What’s more, a liberal education nurtures students’ abilities to read carefully, to think rigorously, and to write clearly.

Supporters of liberal education often point to these skills—and the demand for them by employers—when challenged to justify inviting students to devote four years (and tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars) to the study of “impractical” topics.

Ignorance, however, is not the only thing from which a true liberal education frees us. It frees us from conformism—that is, slavery to fashionable opinions and causes. A sure sign that a college or university is failing in its promise to provide a liberal education is the prevalence of ideological dogmatism and intolerance, and the presence of groupthink.

Many Americans today have concerns about higher education. They see spiking university costs and burgeoning student debt. They have entirely legitimate worries that ideological indoctrination has sometimes replaced genuine education. They see double standards on questions of freedom of speech—this is what got the university presidents who appeared before Congress in trouble—and they hear ludicrously false claims about the allegedly wide diversity of viewpoints on campus. They’re appalled that offices supposedly dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” sometimes promote the very opposite of these principles.

Abandoning the cause of liberal education, though, would be exactly the wrong response to these concerns. Instead, we should reform our colleges and universities by refocusing them on the purposes of liberal education: to form young men and women to be determined truth-seekers, courageous truth-speakers, and life-long learners.

Students formed in that way will lead an examined life, a life of critical—and self-critical—inquiry. People who lead examined lives are best equipped to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic republic.

That is the truth James Madison had in mind when he remarked that “only a well-instructed people can be permanently a free people.”

My friend and teaching partner Cornel West says that “the point of a liberal education is to learn how to die.” Students—and parents—are startled by Professor West’s provocative formulation, but it conveys a deep truth: It is from the perspective of our mortality that we can best wrestle with the questions of what is most important in life—what is true and good and beautiful.

There are some things that matter, to be sure, but at the end of the day don’t matter all that much—things like wealth, power, influence, status, prestige, and celebrity. These things aren’t bad in themselves, and it’s not necessarily wrong to want them—after all, they can be used in service of good ends. But they are not good in and of themselves—they are not the things that ultimately matter—those things that are worth having for their own sake.

The things that ultimately matter—the things that are desirable not merely as means to other ends, but as ends themselves—are things like family, friendship, faith, fairness, knowledge, beauty, honor, integrity and other virtues.

To distinguish the things that matter, but not all that much, from the things that really matter, it is necessary to lead an examined life. 

Living an examined life constitutes a necessary condition for the pursuit of what the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle called eudaimonia. While the term is often translated from the Greek as “happiness,” it is more precisely understood as flourishing or fulfillment. Eudaimonia requires that we subject our beliefs and behaviors to rigorous intellectual scrutiny—critically evaluating the values we live by and why we live by them, so that our death will mark the conclusion of a well-thought and well-lived life.

The examined life is, fundamentally, one of self-critical challenges—challenging and refining our beliefs, rather than believing whatever is convenient, fashionable, in line with our self-interest or our prejudices or coarse or base desires. It is not a life of doing as we please; it is rather a life devoted to seeking truth and living in line with truth, as best we grasp it, even when that means mastering our own wayward feelings, prejudices, or passions.

Practitioners of the examined life do not treat critics of their beliefs, even their most deeply cherished beliefs, as enemies. Far from trying to silence those who challenge their convictions, as happens so often today on campuses, they engage critics in a spirit of truth seeking, recognizing that we are all fallible and can be wrong—even about the questions most important to us.

Indeed, the acknowledgement of one’s own fallibility should lead the liberally educated person to be his or her own best critic. The process of constant self-examination, and the self-mastery required to live in line with truth as best one grasps it, is what a genuinely liberal education facilitates. 

Critics will say that I am proposing “ivory tower idealism” that universalizes a view of education which only our society’s elite possess the time and money to attain. But the intrinsic value of a liberal education does not only extend to students on campuses like Princeton and Harvard, or Amherst and Swarthmore. Everybody deserves—and ought—to live an examined life of the sort that is directly enabled by a liberal education, including those who attend community colleges, or vocational training programs, and even those who finish their formal education with high school. 

There’s no reason for community colleges and vocational programs to restrict themselves to providing the information and skills their students need to get a job. Indeed, many such institutions recognize this: students enrolled in professionally oriented programs (nursing or accounting, for example) often nevertheless are required to complete general education requirements through courses in the humanities and social sciences.

Even for students in professional and vocational programs, supplementary courses in the liberal arts contribute to forming them as practitioners of the examined life—people who can distinguish what matters, but not all that much, from what really matters.

Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, famously attributed to his own teacher, Socrates, the axiom that an unexamined life is not worth living. Authentic liberal education places its money on Socrates on that point.

Whatever comes in the new academic year, let’s remind ourselves of the deepest purposes of liberal education: to pursue knowledge that’s worth pursuing not merely as means to other ends, but also for its own sake; and to form students to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers—people who endeavor throughout their lives to liberate themselves from ignorance, prejudice, ideological dogmatism, and slavery to fashionable opinions and their own wayward desires.

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